Search Results

The introduction establishes the historical, cultural and theoretical contexts and frameworks that guide the monograph. While the aim of this study is to engage with and entertain the illuminating possibilities of Casement’s notoriously amorphous legacy, rather than attempt to assert any definitive biographical narrative, tracing the contours of Casement’s extraordinary life is necessary if we are to fully appreciate the complex contradictions that shaped Casement’s existence. To this end, a concise but thorough overview of Casement’s life is offered in the first part of the introduction in order to lay important foundations for the project’s literary discussion and analysis.

The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.

The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.

As an expert observer Seneca avows the decline of declamation, and we are all too ready to believe him. Many imperial practitioners and theorists of eloquentia (‘skilled speech’) appeal to decline as they engage in projects of considerable sophistication. Yet why resort to a proposition that seems to undermine the authority and value of their literary creations? This chapter examines the topos of decline in discussions of Roman imperial rhetoric, with a specific emphasis on Seneca’s first preface, proposing that, despite its paradoxical surface, decline is of a piece with the programmatic introduction to the collection. This chapter begins by briefly surveying how first- and second-century authors rework this theme as part of a larger literary project to justify the continued role of rhetoric in Roman culture. Discussion of decline is a rhetorical strategy that situates an author in relation to contemporaries and to the Roman past, creating a sense of cultural identity and continuity. If Seneca did not invent the topos, he is our first full witness of its workings in the rhetorical tradition, to which the chapter then turns. Seneca’s encyclopedic emphasis naturally falls on memoria, one of the canonical rhetorical departments, which is contrasted with biological metaphors describing cultural growth and decay. By drawing these parallels, Seneca compares memoria—a product of natura—with senectus, thus both recalling his youth and giving new life to the world of declamation.

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.