Throughout Varro’s fragmentary corpus is a seeming obsession with textual afterlives, his own as well as of others. This was not merely a literary trope, but an idea grounded in Neoptolemus of Parium’s ars poetica and its counter-intuitive definition of ‘poet’. In his theory of poetry, ‘poet’ refers not to the historical poet who creates a poem, but to the meaning or ‘mind’ of a poem, and this ‘poet’ (the poet scriptus) acquires an immortality denied to the flesh-and-blood poet (the poet scribens). Varro’s approach to literary history is informed by this definition of ‘poet’, and when he writes about Rome’s literary past, his interest is less in biographical data about historical poets than in poetic self-preservation through mimesis. An examination of fragments from the De poetis, the De poematis, the De comoediis Plautinis, and the poetic epitaphs preserved in Gellius demonstrates how Varro’s interest in literary immortality and mimesis was misread as literary history in the narrow sense.

The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

Looking ahead to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Chapter 3 turns to the issue of antitheatrical sentiment and polemic and the pressure its moralising brought to bear on playwrights rethinking Kyd’s design. The chapter looks to Marston’s parody of Kyd (and possibly of Shakespeare) in Antonio’s Revenge as a case study of a highly innovative and satirical revenge play on this continuum which consciously comments on the metatheatrical ethics of its genre, and in so doing reflects on the didactic pressures exerted on Renaissance English playwrights to justify and sustain the moral coherence of their dramatic spectacle in practice. Marston’s ironic treatment of what had already become by the late 1590s trite dramatic conventions shows how one competitive playwright was exploring new dramatic possibilities within the genre which would allow his audience to test viable ethical alternatives to a queasy morality through a shared theatrical experience.

Is tragedy choral? Let us return finally to the question of origins, but let us do so while keeping strictly to the poetical, narrative and ritual dimensions. We will now be able to draw some conclusions regarding the pragmatics of the tragic choral voice – both masculine and feminine – as it is orchestrated by the poets who stage, in the service of the city, an action belonging to its heroic past.

Although Nietzsche rejects the Platonic legacy in the name of the earth, there are resonances between the two thinkers. They share a critique of the Western democratic city. Both carry out a transvaluation of values: rejecting received notions of truth and justice. Both reject the notion that art, drama and tragedy occupy a separate “spectacular” sphere over against the quotidian life of the city. Both advocate a reintegration of life with art. Yet Nietzsche’s naturalism apparently allows only for the supremacy of the middle rank of Indo-European tripartition, to which Plato appeals in Republic: the Kshatriya power of aristocratic thumos. There is no place seemingly for the Brahmanic class of wise priestly rulers. How to understand the role of Zarathustra: is his advocacy of pure generosity an appeal to transcendence and so an irreducible good to which the warriors must advert? Inversely, is Plato’s good that which offers nothing in itself because it is beyond being, but only illuminates the terrestrial that comes after it and shares in it? Is it possible to mediate the two thinkers in this way? To a degree I shall argue that it is, though also that it is Plato whose metaphysical framework is less dualistic, who sees generosity less as merely accidental and as necessarily oscillating with cruelty.

Chapter 5 carries out a methodological experiment starting from perspectivism as a theory of reality, used as a heuristic device, producing a dialogue mediated by translating this native theory into our archaeological terms. The focus is on the relations between humans and things where materiality has all the qualities seen previously, non-human entities can be persons, and the capacity for agency relates to the possibility that objects will become persons. The focus is on anthropomorphic vessels from Ambato and their contexts, considered as objects that can be subjects with a point of view. Three relational situations are analysed: the manufacturing process, the contexts of use and abandonment. Manufacture, as the genesis of these vessels as subjects, is analysed through three procedures: as a copy of a model, as mimesis of a mythical object with human properties and as a form of quotation or reference to socially inscribed ways of making. It is argued that such object subjects could be de-subjectivized to turn them into pure objects. Finally, the chapter details how the relationships people established with such vessels responded to the principles of predation and commensality, just as other forms of relationship between humans and non-humans.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

The Sound and the Fury depicts how information at a certain level of complexity acquires its own quasi-agency – a hyper-mimetic ability to replicate itself through surfaces and selves. Among the many objects and surfaces that exhibit this mimetic agency, two images – the clock and the statue – lie at the heart of Faulkner’s cartography of the postbellum plantation system and allow us to understand the author’s diagnosis of the modernization of the planter system, not simply as a scaling social order, but as a coercive flow of ideology in the the era of Jim Crow ascendency. This chapter shows that Faulkner imagines planter heritage as a social force that invades the psyche, vertiginously scaling through a series of mimetic surfaces to find expression both in the financialization of the New South and in the Confederate monuments that replicate ideology through the social body. The statue of the Confederate soldier is the ultimate case in point. The mimetic semblance is not alive, yet a commonality of plantation culture is enacted between this information object and those who are forced to endure its imprint, to become mimetic surfaces robbed of depth and immanent life.

This chapter focuses on musical interpretations of Giambattista Marino’s (1569–1625) pastoral poetry in Monteverdi’s Sixth Book of madrigals from 1614. The pastoral mode gave Monteverdi licence to create imaginary worlds of musical shepherds and nymphs, just as it had given Marino the opportunity to create a web of poetic references reaching back to antiquity. The formal and stylistic experiments found in the pastoral madrigals, or the rime boscherecce, provided Monteverdi fertile ground from which to use musical materials in a similar way. The affinities and, in many cases, the incongruities between the pastoral images and characters in the texts and Monteverdi’s manipulation of them in music created a new kind of listening experience for the audience. It invited them to delight in the unexpected.

Gilbert White – famed naturalist, clergyman, and sometime-poet – played with the relationship between echoes and poetry in surprising ways in his Natural History of Selborne (1789). White used Latin poetry as an instrument to measure echoes, and he played around with English prosodic ideas about ‘sound echoing’ sense. This chapter’s reading of White’s echo play highlights the ways in which assumptions baked into our category of ‘poetry’ – that it isn’t science, that it is an unlikely instrument for measurements, that it has something to do with expressive subjectivity, that in English it involves feet and substitutions – can obscure what and how people heard in the past. We should be wary of using understandings of lyric forged by Romantic poets and anachronistically instituted as central to all poetry to make sense of how and why someone like White engaged it. We should be wary of assuming even something as basic as how many syllables people of the past heard in particular lines.

This chapter considers how Fantasy has been shaped by and shaped modern understandings that privilege facts, realism and scientific knowledge. It argues that while Fantasy has often been belittled by discourses that seek to define what is true, right and possible, fantasies have engaged in good faith with such discourses while serving as valuable means for negotiating their limitations. The chapter begins by discussing Enlightenment and its oversights, before pivoting to discuss how Fantasy was side-lined by discourses of genius that exalted authors and demeaned audiences, setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey against more sympathetic appraisals by Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and George MacDonald. The back half of the chapter explores how Fantasy engages critically with dominant rationalist and realist understandings that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering works including Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the animated series Arcane, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night refers to a religious ritual in its title that then is excised from the play. It appears to conform in that way to what Stephen Greenblatt has called “a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out.” Yet the play does not conform to such an antithesis of performance and belief. Rather, it is full of mimetic forms of emotion that embody a sense of ritual that revives and reforms social memory. This chapter examines both social ritual and festive forms (both real and fictional) via analogies with liturgy and masque, on the one hand, and theories of memory and emotion, on the other. In the process, it suggests a rewriting of the boundaries of metaphor and embodiment, as well as the sacred and secular.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.