Writing which informs, influences and impresses requires a series of key components. They include the start and end of a piece of content, its style (often known as the voice, or character, of the writing), the critical details of who, what, why, where, when and how, and also an appealing title.

Some Greek texts contain words in Latin script and/or with Latin endings. Latin script occurs mainly in Roman law texts; these are investigated with particular attention to Theophilus Antecessor and the Scholia Sinaitica. Evidence for script mixture within individual words is considered. Words in Latin script and/or with Latin endings are more likely to be codeswitches than loanwords, but some loanwords appear with one or both these features. Multi-word phrases retain their original script and inflections much more often than individual words; these are mostly codeswitches, but some phrases may be loanwords.

The fourth chapter examines the depiction of torture in the Decameron. Boccaccio was fascinated by torture from both an epistemological and narratological standpoint. The greatest storyteller of the Middle Ages could not ignore the enticements of omniscience and narrative closure it proffers. The chapter argue specifically that Boccaccio saw a parallel between plot and due process, on the one hand, and torture and dénouement, on the other. What does torture tell us about the sense of an ending? The torture of Martellino by the sadistic Trevisan judge (2.1) is played as farce. In the tale of Zinevra-Sicruano (2.9), torture provides a happy ending within the fantasy world of romance. In the novella of Tedaldo (3.7), the romance of torture is domesticated by due process and the contingency of the novella form. Respect for due process and plot are abandoned in controversial final novella of the Decameron, the story of Griselda (10.10). After years of imposing unimaginable suffering on his young bride, Gualtieri finally gets his happy ending—but one that makes us question the nature of all endings.

Do short stories cohere into a genre, different from other prose fiction, merely by virtue of their length, or, as some critics have argued, are there narrative and thematic differences that go beyond the question of how long they are? In this chapter, we turn to Digital Humanities methods to explore these questions in a corpus of around 10,000 short stories published in twentieth-century women’s magazines. As we analyze the deployment of characters, the narrative patterns, and the linguistic variety of the short stories in our corpus, we reveal the ways that these popular short stories trace a new history of short story writing. The constraints of “mere” length, our analysis shows, allow short fiction to develop a new kind of narrative, one different from that of the novel. Rather than simply a side-effect of the genre, the shortness of the short story is fundamental to understanding its narrative possibilities.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are notable for their resolution. It is precisely this quality that leads characters such as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, Stevens in Remains of the Day, Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, and Kathy H in Never Let Me Go to make life-defining but ethically dubious decisions. In this sense, irresolution can be seen, paradoxically and not unproblematically, as a key Ishigurian virtue. Indeed, irresolution inheres in Ishiguro’s novels in terms of narrative form as well as ethics and theme: rather than offering epiphany, consolation, redemption, or any final hermeneutic closure or disclosure, the novels are insistent, resolute in their tendency towards thematic, ethical, and structural irresolution. At the same time, however, the desire for resolution is shown to be an understandable one, and to underlie the characters’ efforts to make meaning from the worlds and situations in which they find themselves.

Robin Feuer Miller closes the volume with a meditation on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharpness of its image long after one looks away from the text.

Through its overarching frame story but also in the interplay among its diverse tales, the Canterbury Tales again and again troubles our sense of how endings work, promising resolutions that never quite materialize or are undercut as soon as they do. This feature of the Tales offers us the opportunity to consider endings less as a single narrative feature than as a set of persistent and varied problems related to composition, to language, to audience, and to poetry, as a way of considering the cadence of life itself. We follow Rosemarie McGerr in asserting that a certain kind of “irresolution” is a defining feature of the Chaucerian poetic, a poetic of openness and ambiguity, a consideration of the limits and problems of teleology for the poetic enterprise, for an audience of hearers, or for human living. The poet’s troubles with endings date from the start of his career, with his earliest major poem, the Book of the Duchess, offering a particularly useful example, and they extend past the poet’s own ending, as Chaucer’s fifteenth-century audience saw the Canterbury Tales both as an “open” text, ripe for additions, and as an “unfinished” text, a structure begging to be completed.

I have been a die-hard fan of the band Blue Öyster Cult since a friend loaned me a copy of The Revolution by Night in the seventh grade. Donald Roeser (a.k.a. Buck Dharma) is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated guitarists in rock-and-roll history. Although many people might not recognize the name, they probably know his best-known song, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” It was used in the original Halloween movie, and later—more prominently—during the opening credits of the television adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. It continues to enjoy steady rotation on classic rock radio, and experienced something of a renaissance at the turn of the millennium after being featured in the classic Saturday Night Live sketch “More Cowbell” starring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken.