Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

Rabaté’s chapter traces the evolving interpretations of the revolutionary nature of Joyce’s writing. Beginning by retelling the reception of Joyce by Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and the turn towards historical and political readings, he argues for the theories of Jacques Rancière as allowing a synthesis of the two strands in the reception of Joyce’s work. Rabaté examines Joyce’s interest in the Italian theorist of history, Guglielmo Ferrero, tracing to Ferrero’s history Joyce’s interest in universal history, to his anti-Caesarism Joyce’s interest in the subversion of imperial figures, and to his theories of various migrant groups, and anti-Semitism specifically, Joyce’s conception of Leopold Bloom and his socialism. Rabaté moves from this notion of migration to Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and polyglossia to address the subversive humor of the Wake. Using the term “determinate negation” coined in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer, he argues that Joyce’s last work achieves a continuous dynamism through its use of principle of negation.

Grief permeates all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one’s sense of life and individuality collapses into something rote and mechanical. This chapter investigates how Hamlet the play, and Hamlet the character, exceed early modern conventions concerning grief in an effort to turn a harrowingly ‘common’ emotion into something much more ‘particular’. By moving away from established understandings of grief, Shakespeare’s play explores how this devastating passion might create new worlds of meaning and, in doing so, help set ‘out of joint’ ones ‘right’. At the same time, the chapter examines how an over-investment in the idiosyncratic nature of grief undermines and even callously contributes to other tragedies in the play, including Ophelia’s death and Denmark’s crumbling political order. Ultimately, the play dramatises both the difficulty and urgency of balancing the ‘particular’ and the ‘common’ when it comes to grief, even as it leaves the possibility of their coexistence unresolved.

This introductory chapter charts the major directions that the Gothic aesthetic took in Britain, America and Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Commencing with an account of the critical formation and consolidation of the notion of ‘Gothic literature’ itself, it discusses the critical work of figures such as Nathan Drake, Walter Scott, George Stillman Hillard and Edmund Gosse. Showing the extent to which this literary-historical category was defined against, and in relation to, canonical British Romanticism, it surveys the anti-Gothic rhetoric of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt and others. Through consideration of the work of Thomas B. Shaw, William John Courthope and Edward Dowden, it tracks the persistence of such Romantic attitudes in the literary historiography of the nineteenth century. Exploring, in its final sections, the volume’s contents, the Introduction situates the chapters that follow in relation to some of the major developments in literary, historiographical and architectural Gothic culture across the nineteenth century.