The Catullus of the Augustans is, above all, a poet of love. Regularly paired with Calvus, as in the two quotations above, he is hailed for his doctrina (‘learning’) and lasciuia (‘licentiousness’, ‘playfulness’), and acknowledged as a founding father of erotic elegy: Propertius locates him in the canon of love-poets that also includes Cornelius Gallus, and to which he himself aspires; and Ovid imagines him as coming to greet his successor, the recently dead Tibullus, in a literary Elysium.

The long-running debate about the ‘origins’ of Latin love elegy has regularly recognised that Catullus had an important part to play in the formation of this short-lived genre: Poem 68 (or ‘68b’) – with its introspective focus and complex use of mythological paradigms – is commonly cited as a (if not the) foundational text.

Chapter 29 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in Australia and New Zealand, examining figures such as Pansy Montague, Elizabeth Cox, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ruth Gilbert, Mary Barnard, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Alan Loney, Edward Jenner, Bertram Mackennal, Norman Lindsay, Jack Lindsay, and Jane Montgomery Griffiths.

In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty criticizes what he calls the cultural Left for its “Gothic” account of American history, an account that is haunted by specters of power and hypocrisy and that condemns the United States for atrocities for which no future acts can atone. He contrasts this account to the pride the older reformist Left had in the United States and its commitment to fulfilling its still-unachieved ideals of freedom and equality. This paper argues that in relation to a morally burdened past Americans need to learn to practice a form of cognitive dissonance, learning to elide neither its failures nor its possibilities and progress.

This chapter, paired with Chapter 2, suggests a close connection between politics at all levels in Atwood’s thinking, contrasting Somacarrera’s discussion of personal power politics with Rao’s analysis of power politics at the national level. It traces the development of themes of home and exile across selected texts: Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. The argument focuses on concepts of home and estrangement, showing how discourses of home are an extension of discourses of nation and national belonging, and how across Atwood’s later novels discourses of home have shifted into discourses of insecurity and alienation. Here storytelling is of paramount importance, providing patterns of meaning and a form of therapy as it becomes a poetics of survival in a postapocalyptic world where any idea of habitation is fragile and home is no longer a place of safety.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.

In this paper I first worry that Rorty’s attack on various conceptions of “the world” has an alarming tendency to veer from opposition to the kind of realism that he associates with various philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, or even Kant, into skepticism about ordinary activities including those of observing things and referring to them. I try to uncover the roots of this slide in various semantic doctrines, and explore the distinction between minimalist or deflationist theories of truth, and any wider, and less plausible general doctrine of semantic minimalism.

This chapter explores the variety of genres within which Atwood has chosen to write about history, interweaving historical fact with imaginative rewriting and reinventing, with reference to her poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her nonfiction essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” and her novels. The focus is on Atwood’s narrative art, with detailed analyses of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin. These novels with their splicing together of different genres (historical documentary, fictive autobiography, crime fiction, dystopias, Gothic) illustrate the multiple scripts and alternative perspectives through which history may be told, in Atwood’s reappraisal of Canada’s national history and heritage myths, as she reinterprets Canadian themes through her contemporary social, ethical, and global concerns.

Where contemporary thinkers well disposed towards Rorty tend to emphasize the significance of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, more skeptical voices are apt to impugn his relevance to ongoing debates in philosophy on the grounds that that work’s attempt to dispose of the traditional conception of the discipline in the name of a nebulous “literary criticism” is little more than an exercise in self-therapy. The contention of this chapter, then, is that the antagonism this emphasis generates is both unfruitful and ill-conceived. Taking as its starting point reactions to criticism of his early (eliminativist) materialism, it argues that Rorty’s work in the 1970s offers a vindication of the activity of traditional philosophy, albeit within the broader conception of intellectual inquiry we’ve come to call neopragmatism and – latterly – “cultural politics.” From this perspective, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is just one (perhaps self-revealing) prophetic-theoretical proposal amongst many that neopragmatism/philosophy-as-cultural-politics makes possible. But that in turn shows how important this period of Rorty’s work is, not only to understanding his later output but also to elucidating the options available to contemporary philosophy.

In “Globalization, the Politics of Identity, and Social Hope,” Rorty presents a pair of claims: tinkering with the concepts of “identity” and “difference” cannot be made politically useful, but tinkering with the concepts of “rationality” and “truth” can be made politically useful. In this chapter, I use this pair of claims to explain Rorty’s reasons for thinking that leftist critics of his liberalism fail to recognize that they are themselves part of the liberal “we” to which he regularly refers. When Rorty claims that tinkering with rationality and truth can be made politically useful, he has in mind the anti-authoritarian idea that moving from philosophy to redescription makes room for social progress. When he claims that tinkering with “identity” and “difference” cannot be made politically useful, he is making two points: the politics of identity as a philosophical program is overly theoretical and overly pessimistic, but the politics of identity as a political project is nothing other than good old-fashioned liberalism. Together, these claims leave leftist philosophers and activists in a position where we cannot radically undermine liberalism, but where we can work to gradually reform it.

This chapter considers the central place of dystopia in Atwood’s work since 2000 in its discussion of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments. The focus is on the contrasts between the trilogy with its epic dimensions of postapocalyptic speculation and the two later dystopias that return to the network of human relations in situations close to our contemporary world. Analysis of the trilogy traces its narrative arc across three volumes from global disaster to futuristic vision, while The Heart Goes Last is darkly comic social satire addressing anxieties around threats to human freedom in the age of corporate capitalism, high-tech surveillance, and biomedical experiments. In The Testaments Atwood reclaims her story in real time with its update of Gilead, focusing on patriarchal tyranny and women’s strategies of resistance, ending with a glimmer of hope. An emphasis on Atwood’s storytelling with its genre-crossing strategies establishes connections between these dystopias, identifying the distinctive Atwood idiom.