A collaboration between poetry and nationalism, exemplified by the tutelary border guard or “genius of the shore,” accounts for the interest of many Renaissance poems; redrawing the map, poets express the myths and grievances that hold their nations together. In “Lycidas,” Milton tries to redeem the fatal voyage of Edward King, his Anglo-Irish friend, by renewing the ideal of a missionary spirit, joining poet, saint, and soldier in a protectorate to bridge Ireland and England. In The Lusiads, Camões personifies the Cape of Storms as the titan Adamastor (“Unconquerable”), who curses the audacity of da Gama's voyagers and predicts their future calamities; hence the figure represents both the glory and the self-pity of Portugal and of its national poet. Though Milton and Camões hope for a bright colonial future, they turn their faces, like Benjamin's Angel of History, toward memories of shipwreck in the past.

Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians (1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney's North, Brian Friel's play Translations, and McGuinness's Carthaginians to show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

Kafka's letters and notebooks reveal a surprising link between his Schriftstellersein ‘literary being’ and what he regarded as his fundamentally bureaucratic nature. Katka used the term Beamtengeist ‘bureaucratic mind’ to refer both to a mode of critical consciousness driven by a neurotic obsession with order and security and to a longing for social solidarity based on duty. His understanding of Beamtengeist can be placed in a historical context of social-scientific concern regarding the effects of increasing bureaucratization. The dialectical ambivalence inherent in the concept is apparent throughout Kafka's work but is most clearly represented in “Der Bau,” a story often read as a meditation on his self-conception as a writer. “Der Bau” traces the demise of a molelike creature whose Berechnungskunst ‘art of calculation’ condemns him to unbearable isolation. This reading suggests a need to reexamine the proverbial separation of art and life as it has been applied to this quintessentially modernist writer.