Hannibal and Scipio left no autobiographies, except that Hannibal in 205, before leaving Italy for Africa, inscribed a bilingual account of his military resources. Scipio’s contemporary funeral elogium (list of his offices and achievements, a kind of succinct obituary) does not survive (a much later one does). This chapter offers, by way of introduction, semi-fictional replacements for these missing documents and explains what Hannibal’s full inscription is likely to have contained. Other first-person evidence by the two men is quoted and discussed, such as letters reported in the literary sources. The chapter closes by asking what Hannibal and Scipio looked like. Appendix 1.1 lists and evaluates the sources for the book, and there is a sub-section on reliability of speeches. Appendix 1.2 addresses the problem of whether Plutarch’s lost Life of Scipio was about Hannibal’s opponent or Scipio Aemilianus, his younger relative by adoption. Appendix 1.3 is about ‘roving anecdotes’.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the most prominent figures in the 1830s literary scene. She became known, and was often condemned, for a ‘fatal facility’: a tendency to write too easily and too frequently for a market that was itself so overproductive that its grasp on posterity’s regard has proved unstable. Landon’s work in the 1830s mirrors the decade in its variety, its speed of production, its dubiety about cultural status, and its self-conscious reflection on its own potential place in literary history. This chapter explores a wide range of Landon’s 1830s work, work that has typically been passed over by her critics. It explores her interactions with the market via such forms as Silver Fork fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and ‘hack’ journalism. Her work is shaped by her unstable place as both a literary celebrity and a worker for the press, a combination of identities that was especially difficult for a woman writer. She became the decade’s chronicler: her experiments in 1830s literary forms produce a mode of understanding the uncertain temporality of this unusually self-conscious decade.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.

As literary realism shed earlier providential paradigms, William Thackeray inaugurated a startling interest in alternatives to reality as essential for novels that would be true to life. These “queer speculations” saturate his writing: a child who might have lived, an accident that could have been avoided, a war that would have ended otherwise if only …. Thackeray’s counterfactual imagination matures from occasional stories of the 1840s, through Vanity Fair (1847–48), the Roundabout Papers (1860–63), and Lovel the Widower (1860). His conditionals range from frenzied anticipation to paralyzing regret, developing from wild wagers and total reversals of fortune in the early sketches to a late style where memory, narrative, and writing itself are marked by virtuality. This chapter examines uncertain experience in Thackeray’s oeuvre in relation to historical writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and accounts of counterfactual reasoning in psychology and narrative theory. Probing uncertainty’s emotional and tonal modulations, Thackeray’s writing widens the space of novelistic realism to include the nonmimetic, hypothetical, improbable, and open-ended – or what he terms the “might-have-beens.”

This chapter studies two contrasting models for predictive thinking and representation in Thomas Hardy. In The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s depiction of repetitive phenomena evokes one renovated account of logico-mathematical probability, John Venn’s empirical theory about how we judge from series of instances. In the novel’s palpably antiquated rural setting – where characters intuit more than they see, gamble by the light of glowworms, and infer human plots from long-run traces in the material world – the abstractions of Victorian logic acquire concrete form. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), by contrast, serial iterations are compressed into images. Hardy designs literary equivalents of Francis Galton’s “composite photographs,” used to model statistical data and mental processes. Characters think in overlays, detecting a parent’s face playing over that of a child, designing a future self by laying transparencies over the present, and imagining human plots as grids from overhead. Serial and composite thinking extend to Hardy’s “approximative” theory of fiction. He uses these tropes as an implicit riposte to critics and advocates for a novelistic realism tolerant of repetition, coincidence, and improbability.

This chapter offers a “conceptual geography” of the ways irony is expressed and understood through several representations of irony, as seen, for example, in fiction and film. Currie draws the careful distinction between cases where an event is represented as being ironic without the event itself being ironic (e.g., a film scene may be constructed to express irony without the scene itself necessarily being an example of situational irony). Dramatic irony, for example, often succeeds because of our knowing something that the characters do not. But the characters’ lack of knowledge is only a pointer to the irony and is not what actually constitutes the irony. Many so-called instance of verbal irony are “expressive,” but not really “communicative,” because they are expressive of an ironic state of mind without a speaker specifically aiming to communicate irony. Currie’s chapter dives into many of these complexities, which are too often ignored in theoretical discussions and explications of irony. His overarching aim is to raise our awareness about what should be counted as irony and what “should be abandoned as the product of an inflated vocabulary.”

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.

This chapter tackles the term “truth” as a criterion of Johnson’s criticism. The central focus is Johnson’s apparent preference for poetical works based on actual events from history. In two exemplary cases from Dryden and Pope there is the implicit suggestion that such an anchorage in history is a merit. But there are many occasions – the defective historical allegory of Absalom and Achitophel and Johnson’s taste for the fanciful imaginings in Shakespeare’s comedies (as against the “Histories”). Here critical judgments cannot be reliably linked to such a preference. Analysis concludes that Johnson sought forms of artistry based in the foundational power of common experience: not the mystical, the occult or the abstruse. This is an emotional need for Johnson: The mind “loves” truth. But such a need in no way excluded the fact that Johnson attached extraordinary value to the poetical imagination; it did not weaken his demand for its presence in poetry.

Sebald was an author deeply devoted to the ethical responsibilities and aesthetic possibilities of literary discourse, and this essay explores the importance of history within his constellation of ethical and aesthetic concerns. Special attention is paid to analysing Sebald’s unique fictional prose form that blurs the boundary between literature and historiography. Distinct from historical novels and documentary fiction, Sebald’s works rely on facts and artefacts as much as they need both memory and imagination. While the traces, repression, and erasure of National Socialist crimes are prominent in his works, the German past is not his only concern. Sebald writes on the Belgian colonial oppression in the Congo, the capitalist exploitation of the Amazon forests, and the massacres caused by Napoleon’s military campaigns. Furthermore, trauma is not limited to human experience in Sebald’s works; he devotes attention to the destruction of nature and animals as well. Focusing on Sebald’s attempts to find appropriate ways to approach the past and individual experience, this essay shows how he creates a literary form that both encourages reader engagement and provides empathetic access to the past.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

This chapter examines how and when British government officials considered the nation’s reputation and international standing in decisions about whether to censor literature or theatrical performances. In the early twentieth century, officials in the Home and Lord Chamberlain’s Offices, among others, were eager to appear rational to their Parisian counterparts in the hope that French officials would increase efforts to suppress obscene publications. Simultaneously, British administrators expressed disapproval of American censors, whom they viewed as unduly prudish. As the century wore on, the Americans would outpace British censors in their toleration of obscene materials, and an increasing number of British citizens came to view their government’s response to texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover as benighted and paternalistic. The chapter argues that British censorship was not a strictly national activity but rather took place within the larger framework of international relations and a pursuit of global prestige.

This chapter picks up on the puzzle raised in the previous chapter and attempts in detail to vindicate the unity of the dialogue as a Platonic vehicle for critical engagment by the reader. Focussing on the Charmides section, it lays out and discusses a series of key themes and contrasts which, it is argued, both prepare the reader for Socrates’ discussion with Critias to come and are illuminated on subsequent reading by that discussion. It argues that the way these themes and contrasts are presented is designed to induce readers into occupying a stance of enquiry that orients us towards critical engagement with the Critias section. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the final section of the dialogue, in which Charmides reappears, plays a role in sustaining this critical stance on the reader’s part.