The Coda asks whether Scotland’s undeniable imaginative presence in Macbeth disproves the book’s thesis of erasure. It argues that editors read into Shakespeare’s sources the contrast between England’s political civility and Scotland’s dysfunctional barbarism that is one effect of this brilliant tragedy. Holinshed’s account of Edward the Confessor does not present a society less barbarous than that of Holinshed’s Macbeth, which derives Hector Boece’s elegant Livyan history. Shakespeare evacuates the political-theoretical content of his Scottish sources, substituting the figure of Scotland as a mother unable to nurture her children. Macbeth thus pathologises the Scottish double plight of jurisdictional subordination and alien status with respect to England. The Scottish failure of nationhood becomes a rooted sorrow that even English sovereignty cannot cure.

Chapter 2 considers the war led by Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset. Somerset saw the Scots as culpably resistant to God’s providential plan for an imperial ‘Great Britain’ with Edward VI as emperor. Metalepsis, a reversal of cause and effect, governs Somerset’s rhetoric and military strategy. His 15,000-strong amphibious army entered Scotland in 1547, heralded by a proclamation declaring that Scots who did not recognize the peaceful aim of this invasion would be the cause of violence against themselves. This preposterous logic is perpetuated by modern reference to the wars as ‘Rough Wooings’. The chapter analyses Somerset’s innovative amphibious strategy (fortifying the Forth and the Tay) in terms of the incoherence and hidden violence of his favoured metaphor of Britain as an island fortress walled by the sea, garrisoned by Anglo-Scots love. It interprets Hans Eworth’s arresting painting of Sir John Luttrell rising, naked, from the Firth of Forth. The chapter lays the ground for understanding what is wrong with the modern critical assumption that ‘Great Britain’ was James VI and I’s project and what is at stake in the occlusions that such a misreading of history permits.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

This chapter examines recurring instances in the Brontë juvenilia where the siblings intervene in their narratives as omnipotent author-gods, called the ‘Chief Genii’, who reshape the imaginary world by writing it. I trace this narrative and play practice back to its roots in the pseudo-Oriental tales of The Arabian Nights and James Ridley, but also argue for its wider significance to the literary-theoretical metaphor (employed by writers from Gustave Flaubert to Roland Barthes) of the author as divine creator of the narrative reality. In counterpoint to existing scholarship which tend to emphasise generic differences between the juvenilia and Brontë’s mature work, I offer a reading of The Professor as a continuation of the Genii authorship within the realist novel, and thereby defend Brontë’s reputation as an author of vicarious ‘wish-fulfilment’. Brontë provides a starting case for this book’s larger argument about the alternative uses of the novel as a fictional reality, rather than a historical representation, an aesthetic work, or an ethical parable.

In the metalepsis situated at the centre of the text, the God of Love disorients the reader with the revelation that the romance that the latter was sure of having read has not yet been written and that it will be the work of two authors of which the first is in danger of dying and the second has not yet been born. In the verses in question, which take their inspiration not only from ‘Parisian philosophy’ but also from the ‘legalists’ of Orléans and the teachings of Joachim of Fiore (by means of Gerard de Borgo San Donnino), an authorial hypostasis takes place (or a supposition according to Scholastic terminology), which is expressed through the triad ‘Guillaume de Lorris’ – ‘God of Love’ – ‘Jean Chopinel’, and which provides the romance’s underlying unity, its allegorical mysteries, and its modalities of enunciation.