There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

This essay explores the novel’s vexed position within the emergent genteel culture of the early United States. It charts a broad transformation in the genre’s status between the 1780s and 1820s as the novel gradually becomes widely, if unevenly, accepted as respectable, even edifying, reading material. In tracing this shift, the essay explores how certain novelists of this period sought to establish the respectability of their own novels in part by distancing their works from the novel genre’s association with aristocratic frivolity. In this, these novels exemplify the early republic’s conflicted attitude toward gentility as such. The essay argues that these novels played an important role in this era’s more general recasting of gentility as bourgeois respectability rather than aristocratic fashionableness. The prevailing social and political conservatism of these novels, however, should not obscure the sustained literary experiment they undertook in reimagining the social meaning of the novel in the early United States.

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.

This chapter begins from the historical conjecture that, at the level of social and political geography, globalization is best defined by the practical and symbolic parcellisation of social and political space, not through metaphors of borderlessness. Such parcellisation is epitomised by the proliferation of actual enclaves zones such as business parks, gated communities, refugee camps and export processing zones. They also have their fantasy versions, such as the so-called No-Go Zones that, political activists and commenters have alleged, represent areas of effective Muslim secession from secular states such as Britain and France. The chapter considers empirical and theoretical evidence for the break-up of global social space. It concludes by showing how these spaces become important formal and thematic topoi in contemporary literary works by J. G. Ballard, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. Other authors discussed include John Berger and Joseph O’Neill.

This chapter on Wuthering Heights (1848) explores the work carried out by the verbs in the novel. Emily Brontë’s style makes evocative use of imperatives, and of active and passive verb forms. A distinction is drawn between the predominant verb forms of the first and second parts of the novel, so that the second half seems more passive and reactive, and therefore to indicate suffering. The imperative often calls an action into being, all the more so when compliance with an imperative is then assumed rather than narrated, as it frequently is in the novel. In this way, the imperative is like fiction itself, bringing into existence an imagined state of affairs; in this analysis, the style of Wuthering Heights starts to seem conversant with the novel’s shifts between its own imagined world and the reality of ours or its first readers to which it appeals.

A rich body of recent scholarship has commented on the depth of Ellison’s engagements with major developments in sociology and psychology, including direct engagements with the work of Robert Park, John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. Ellison showed a sustained interest and concern with the new prominence of sociology and psychology in mid-century policy decisions in the U.S. Accordingly, his fiction and chapters consistently engaged with these disciplines’ claims to knowledge of African American culture as compared with other ways of knowing, such as naturalist fiction, Marxist analysis, music, and folklore.

This chapter argues that the spatialising habits of the short fiction of the period can best be understood in terms not only of a modernist preoccupation with the complex and ambiguous layering of urban milieu, but of its polar opposite: the threat (or promise) of movement, of inter-relation, which unsettles the remote traditional communities portrayed in local colour writing. James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and ‘The Stranger’, and ‘A Conjugal Episode’, a late story by one of the most successful New Woman novelists, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), will be taken to exemplify the first of these tendencies. The second can be shown to include stories about Englishness and empire, by Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence; stories about migration, by Joseph Conrad and George Moore; and stories about ghosts, by M. R. James and May Sinclair. In either case, short fiction tended to be at its best, and most characteristic, when least forgiving.

Plautus’ Pseudolus plays upon the concept of ‘credit’, and reveals the similar nature of the belief that audiences grant to the stage-events and the belief in someone’s credit that underpins borrowing and lending. The Roman understanding of credit in both senses anticipates the modern emergence of the concept of fiction within a modern mercantile economyy.

Against those who say that the ancient world never developed a theory of fiction, the chapter argues that a concept of fiction is operative already in Homer and is articulated in Aristotle’s Poetics, and explores the relationship between ancient and modern theories of what kind of assent audiences and readers give to what they are reading or seeing on the stage.

Surrealist practice of the early twentieth century anticipates the biopolitics of contemporary animal philosophy. Modern surrealists welcomed Charles Darwin's paradigm shift, moving beyond any bright line that distinguished humans as a species from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surrealism's investment in evolutionary biology – promoted in journals such as Minotaure, Documents, and View – buttressed its political critique of humanist exceptionalism, sovereign individualism, and any ideal telos that defined the origins and destiny of humankind. Although surrealist animal representations frequently lapse into anthropocentric fantasy, surrealist manifestoes, art, poetry, fiction, and drama remain undeniably revolutionary in depicting human/animal hybridity and assailing the oppressive discursive linkages among classism, colonialism, and speciesism. In particular, the later careers of surrealists such as Leonora Carrington look ahead to recent ecofeminist and environmental debates concerning an “ethic of care,” defining kinship and companion networks in a decidedly posthuman community of human and nonhuman animals.

This chapter explores the trajectory of American urban ethnic literature, focusing on Italian American fiction –– after brief consideration of Jewish American fiction –– as selected writers make their journey from immigrants to ethnics. Unlike the few Italian immigrant writers who preceded them, whose work argued for acceptance as human beings and recognition as Americans, the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants documented and explored the conditions under which they were born and raised. We see over the years in the shift from earlier Italian-American writers’ origin narratives featuring struggles with the host culture, alienation from the ancestral culture, and the price of integration, to the inward turn of later writers whose work mark the passage of the literary city from realist to modernist narrative. That inward turn toward loss in later generations is not merely formal; it measures the distance between a vibrant ethnic urban world commonly founded on regional identities (often called campanilismo) to the shards of memory, the ancestral ghosts that survive in recreated identities, and poses the aesthetic and existential question of what to make of it.

Wright’s literary career was encouraged by the Communist Party-sponsored John Reed Club and nurtured within the proletarian literary movement whose writers were committed to representing class inequality and warfare from the standpoint of the eventual triumph of the proletariat. Like many other proletarian writers, his fiction is, therefore, strongly influenced by the philosophy of dialectical materialism popular within the Communist movement. Wright’s fiction, notably Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, powerfully synthesizes a dialectical perspective with literary realist and naturalist representational techniques, although he also experimented with avant-garde literary techniques he associated with the likes of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as evident in Lawd Today! His fiction depicts the ways in which his mostly poor, working-class black characters suffer intensely from the class system of capitalism and the racism it engenders. It also depicts the inherent potentials within his characters’ lives to transcend ideologically and materially the inimical social system at the root of their suffering.