Chapter 1 explores one of the most enduring popular works for children, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Charles Dodgson wrote it at a time when the very conception of childhood as a distinctive and cherished stage of human development was being explored and, through the popularity of Dodgson’s penmanship, being promulgated. Dodgson’s interest in children is also apparent from his (now controversial) photographs of children and from his obsessively detailed exchanges with his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, over the presentation of Alice and other works for children. Dodgson sought to curate the way young readers entered into and experienced the fantasy realm. He appeared to draw the line at ventures he judged could dilute the fantasy, such as mass-manufactured goods produced outside of Victorian artistic creative industries. Dodgson wrote at a time when authors could and did control the terms of engagement with their fantasy through the exercise of copyright. Management, agency and legal relations would supersede this authorial power and authority in the following century.

With so much attention on DeLillo’s novels, it is easy to lose track of his success and eminence as a playwright. DeLillo has written five full-length plays, The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (first production 1986), Valparaiso (first production 1999), Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2005), and The Word for Snow (first production 2007), several of which continue to be produced regularly in theatres throughout the world. Through these plays, readers can understand the influence of various playwrights on both the plays and the novels, as well as the influence that DeLillo’s sociopolitical context had on his playwriting. By examining the wider context in which the plays sit, in addition to the theatrical elements of spoken word, scene, spectatorship and ephemerality, we will notice how writing for the theatre is a political act for this writer.

This chapter explores Cavendish’s career as a dramatist by examining the similarities and differences between her two volumes of drama, Playes (1662) and Plays Never Before Printed (1668). One of the plays in the 1668 volume, The Sociable Companions; or the Female Wits, recycles and adapts characters and plot – the story of a character called Prudence and her search for a husband – from The Publick Wooing, a play included in the 1662 volume. This pair of plays provides an opportunity to trace Cavendish’s response to changing theatrical conditions, while also revealing the flexibility of her principles of dramatic composition. By reworking the character of Lady Prudence in The Public Wooing in her later play, Cavendish explores the possibilities and limitations of prudence as a virtue available to women. Further, her recycling of this plot from one play to another reveals the prudential thinking that underlies her own writing and publication practices. Plays Never Before Printed includes two dramatic fragments – “A Piece of a Play” and “Scenes” from The Presence – that highlight the potential for transformation inherent in Cavendish’s dramatic works.

Learning in the arts is distinct from most other subjects for three reasons. First, the arts are centrally a representational domain and learning in the arts involves becoming aware of how representational choices communicate meaning to different audiences. Second, form and meaning are integrated; artistic representations are saturated with meaning, and subtle variations are consequential to that meaning. Third, work in the arts involves examining identify and culture, because artistic cognition is intertwined with both. This chapter argues that these three distinct features of arts learning have implications for our understanding of learning more generally. The chapter reviews four types of research: (1) how the arts have been studied in educational settings; (2) how learning occurs in different arts including music and visual arts; (3) the key features of arts learning: the role of the audience, critique, authentic assessment, and role taking; (4) how an arts-based perspective can contribute to our understanding of learning in all subjects.

The function of the beginning of a story. You don’t have to get the opening right before you can make any progress. Different kinds of openings. Starting with exposition. Starting in medias res. The necessity of having a sense of an ending while writing. Judging when to stop. The importance of how the story lands, rather than where it ends. The role of tension in a story. The cliffhanger. Arousing the reader’s curiosity. The importance of pace and how to sustain it. Methods of interrogating your writing for tension and pace.

‘Each chapter needs a narrative function. If you can’t summarise the purpose of a chapter you would be wise to check that it really does have a function. The other way to interrogate your writing for pace and tension is to ask yourself: What does the reader want to know at the end of this chapter?’

Meredith’s novels abound in sentences, understood not just as the verbal form that contains a subject and a predicate, ending in a period, but as sententiae or maxims, which express a general truth or opinion in striking and memorable terms. A long-time feature of argument and rhetoric, sententiae are intimately associated with the development of oral and written prose, though their presence in Meredith’s work has led to the accusation that his novels are excessively poetic. This essay adopts a genealogical approach to Meredith’s style by tracing the development of his earliest sententiae to their recognizably mature form. With roots in the “wisdom” tradition in ancient prophecy and philosophy, Meredith’s sententiae reflect an ideal of cultivated speech historically associated with intelligent conversation and drama, which he then assimilated to narrative fiction. The singularity of the Meredithian sentence – a metaphorically dense and syntactically complex assertion that blends idiosyncratic expression with judgments of common sense – thus arises from synthetic hybridity, overlaying didacticism with description and intellection with image.

Martyrdom is the running thread in this study. Chapter 6 turns its focus to the definitive martyr, Jesus Christ, whose stoic behavior at the Passion established a way forward for those who stood mute. When Herod summoned Jesus before him, the divine prisoner also stood mute. His silence functioned as a means of protest, an interpretation familiar to English communities, who watched the drama unfold annually in the mystery plays. Similarly, depictions of the ancient martyrs also presented silence and passivity as models for resistance. These narratives reinforced the notion that only a heroic martyr stood mute in a court of common law. The world of literature also had much to say on the subject of peine forte et dure. Analysis of works such as Chasteau d’Amour, the Seven Sages of Rome, and Bevis of Hampton all clarify that hard prison was a sentence inflicted by an unmerciful, and often distinctly unchristian, authority. Nonetheless, these stories place peine forte et dure in a positive light: the intense suffering supplies the falsely accused with the ideal surroundings to perform imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), thus assuring his salvation.

The expulsion and defeat of demonic forces is integral to Pentecostal practice. This chapter, Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character, uses close readings of fictional performances allied to the Pentecostal movement to lay out Pentecostalism’s history and its preoccupation with power. Understanding Pentecostal performance of power identity entails not just looking at the practices conducted in the church or the structure of their religious activities, but also at theatrical activities and drama productions about demonic encounters staged to boost Pentecostal faith. The mediatized accounts of spiritual warfare narrated by Pentecostal drama ministers are strategic to the reading of the Pentecostal social history and ritual actions. This chapter chronicles the Pentecostal trajectory and their demonstrated desire for power through two television dramas about deliverance from satanic attacks, Agbara Nla (The Ultimate Power) and Abejoye (The Kingmaker). Both were produced by the same Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministry, across about three decades. The differences in how both dramas capture the performance of exorcism are instructive in understanding how far the Pentecostal faith has traveled as a social practice and how they have achieved their power identity through a drawn-out period of time.

Not simply the persistence of Greek and Roman comedy and tragedy, drama of the modern era had its rebirth in the liturgical performances within the church. Once the miracle and morality plays were moved out of the church, literally pro-fane, their secularized forms were soon suspected of degeneration, and the antitheatrical prejudice was promulgated. To control the possibly disruptive effects of the drama, censorship was introduced to spare leaders of Church or state from being maligned on stage. The Church of England may have been protected but Gothic melodrama found its villains and victims among the monks and nuns. Methodists, Quakers, Jews, dissenters, and nonconformists were targets for theatrical ridicule or abuse. Circumventing the proscriptions of the Licensing Act (1737), Shakespeare’s history plays provided a model for representing religious conflict on stage.

This Chapter’s objective is to present Grotius’ literary writings as an integral part of his intellectual legacy and to highlight its pertinence to the understanding of his social tenets and moral programme. It addresses this objective from two perspectives, by verifying the heavy moral and political overtones of Grotius’ literary outpourings and by falsifying claims as to the irrelevance, let alone anomaly of the literary input in his legal and political writings. To prove its point, the paper establishes the programmatic overlap of both domains throughout Grotius’ life. It closely links the literary themes from his early years, whether as a playwright or historiographer, to the political bottlenecks of the Dutch Revolt and the socio-religious riddles of the Remonstrant Troubles. It underpins its thesis with reference to Grotius’ later plays on fratricide and exile as reflecting on the pits and peaks of his dramatic personal life. Finally, it identifies the intellectual epitome of Grotius’ literary outpouring in his comprehensive programme to salvage the Greek literary tradition in the social maelstrom of his times, a fitting counterpart to his ambitions to lay down a legal framework of universal appliance and a creed to serve all Christian denominations.

From the revival of the English theatres under the Restoration to the rise of a transnational Romantic theatre in the early nineteenth century, developments in dramatic literature and acting mirrored shifting medical constructions of the body, disease, and health. At the same time, they reflected a deep cultural anxiety about the feigning of illness. This chapter will consider how notions of both true and false ill-health were explored in English drama of the long eighteenth century through the medium of the performed symptom. Symptoms could disclose dramatic internal truths, or could be faked by both patients and actors – and misread by doctors and spectators – to comic effect. For most of the eighteenth century, the latter model prevailed as playwrights and actors drew upon theatre’s association with fakery to mock affected invalidism, incompetent physicians, and the frauds of fashionable society. As nerve-based conceptions of sensibility and vitalist paradigms rose to prominence, however, a new generation of playwrights and performers called upon disease’s symptoms not to spoof quackery but to represent emotional interiority. The resulting performance languages would help to give birth to the Romantic stage.

This chapter returns to the question of Steinbeck’s purported failures as a writer by arguing that his novel Of Mice and Men--a book often taught at the middle-school level--is an experimental work that offers a partial alternative to high modernism’s interest in characters with mental disabilities. The novel’s undeveloped themes, clunky characterization, brutal melodrama, sweeping determinism, and easy sentimentalism originate in a curious fact about the book’s genre: Steinbeck intended it as a “novel to be played”--performed as drama in the theater. The book has an uncanny duality, placing readers both in a novel and in a would-be stage performance, whereby characters are also actors, objects also props, spaces also stage sets. Like Lennie, the character with mental disabilities at the center, the novel is formally “disabled” and behaves in ways not unlike Samuel Beckett’s modernist plays, defined by a failure to signify and mean. Comparing the novel-as-play with the actual three-act play version that Steinbeck wrote later, we also see the limits of the argument for a “modernist” Steinbeck, as the book’s aesthetic failures create a novel that does not fully develop as a literary work.

The panoramic reception of various literary genres in Aristophanic drama is discussed with reference to a specific play, Peace. Thematic and textual allusions to tragedy and earlier comedy are interwoven in connection to the central themes of this play: war and peace. The earlier part of the play, set in a world dominated by armed conflict, revolves around the parody of a quasi ‘trilogy’ of Euripidean tragedies (Aeolus, Stheneboea, and Bellerophontes) and contains further references to tragic passages or motifs of tragic dramaturgy. The latter part, which consists in the celebrations for the regained peace, parades a sequence of routines borrowed from rudimentary forms of comic entertainment, together with reminiscences of iambic poetry. The joys of peace are thus illustrated through a genealogy of the comic genre. The transition from the former to the latter world, through the pivotal scene of Peace’s liberation, is marked by a recast of the themes and stagecraft of satyr play. With its sequence of tragic trilogy, satyr play and assortment of comic materials, the Peace offers virtually the experience of a full festival of the Dionysia within the limits of a single dramatic script.

The chapter explores the genre situation in Norway around the time of Ibsen’s debut, probing the question of why Ibsen chose to write within the genre of drama in his pursuit of a literary career. Particular political and cultural circumstances are relevant here: After centuries of foreign rule, the Norwegian cultural field was small and undeveloped when the country took up the impulses of national romanticism. In this situation, the theatre became an institution of political and cultural prestige, and constituted a forum for a cultural and literary debate that was still largely lacking in the printed press. Furthermore, the genre of drama was largely untarnished by the associations of sentimentality and femininity that still attached to the prose genres, and especially the novel. As for lyric poetry, it was a genre still not in line with the artistic ideals of romanticism, drawing heavily on classicist aesthetics, and particularly so after the death of the romantic poet Henrik Wergeland in 1845. Hence, drama would have appeared a safe genre for å budding poet, a genre that was modern, masculine, national and even potentially profitable.

When Sterne (unsuccessfully) pitched to Robert Dodsley the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, he was directing his novel to the very man whose career had been built on writing and publishing texts which sat on generic boundaries, such as his play The Toy-Shop (1735). Through an analysis of experimental texts in this tradition, including novels such as Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which imported dramatic devices into mid-century prose, this chapter contextualises Sterne’s mise en page experimentation within a wider mid-century fascination with hybrid print forms. Sterne was arguably aware of the theatrical heritage of sermon punctuation when he displaced these typographic characteristics from his professional work into his fiction, where such visual markers appeared innovative and surprising. By analysing Sterne’s sermonic punctuation and linking it to his development of a mid-century aesthetics of typesetting the novel, I suggest that Sterne drew from Anglican works published from within his professional context while responding to a 1750s fashion for printing closet drama and dramatic novels.