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This chapter addresses the issue of how to read and critically decode spectral messages. It analyses the literary qualities of spirit messages. Some of the literary works that are analysed in this chapter include Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’, where it explores the relationship between the literary imagination and clairvoyance. This chapter also takes a look at Browning's poems in order to examine the mysterious transmission of literary ideas.

This chapter examines the ways in which the rural South works as a stimulant for the postmodern African–American literary imagination and the kinds of resolutions it yields to problems of urban literary representation. It focuses on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, because these two novels admit, often self-reflexively but sometimes inadvertently, the difficulties plaguing their own use of the rural South as a device of literary resolution to postmodern urban problems. These difficulties become manifest in Morrison's and Naylor's contradictory treatments of two interconnected systems of cultural value—magic and oral tradition—that are embedded in the rural South and presented as the distinguishing marks of an integral black community.

Thematically within Adama and The Kite Runner, and in their public reception, as with the other Bildungsromane that have been examined in this book, the worlds of geopolitics, consumer capitalism, literary subjectivity, and human rights law, discourse, and practice overlap in a single world. The book is suggesting that the effective limitations of human rights are related not merely to the institutional frailty of the international legal regime but to the historically nationalist limitations of literary imaginations — cognitive limitations that make it possible, in the era of a global “war on terror,” to reduce The Kite Runner to “a story of two childhood friends in Afghanistan” and to read Adama as the expression of a “free voice” from an “empty quarter” rather than to consider the places of the writers and their readers themselves within overlapping world systems.

What are some hallmarks of Catholic vision that might allow readers to identify a Catholic imagination at work when they encounter one? Is it possible to identify lines of continuity among writers whose work is original and entirely unique to that person? And, finally, in what way can seeing—and representing—the world Catholicly bear the stamp of truth for non-Catholics as well as Catholics? This chapter deals with sacramental qualities and themes found among poets and novelists whose works constitute a kind of canon of the Catholic literary imagination. From the nineteenth-century English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins to the mid-twentieth-century French novelist Georges Bernanos and American writer Flannery O'Connor, the chapter examines a spiritual aesthetic best conveyed perhaps in the words of a character dying young in Bernanos's celebrated novel The Diary of a Country Priest. The chapter is particularly attuned to the subtle interplay of language and spirit.

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of the sinister street, which was part of the literary imagination of the twentieth century, and provoked reflections on the writing of literary history. The discussion examines the modernists's visions of the street, which were developed fully in the works of the postmodernists. The next section studies the reflection on the space of literary history caused by these visions. Finally, the chapter identifies the different companions to literature.

This book examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and that continue to haunt the Western literary imagination. An initial investigation of Italy in nineteenth-century Europe raised a host of questions that have sustained this study. In addressing such questions, the book aims to provide the first work in English that considers Italian Romanticism and, more broadly, the modern myth of Italy in a comparative European context. In both popular imagination and historical fact, cliches about Italy continue simultaneously to attract us to the Peninsula and to thwart us from an informed understanding of it. This oscillation between seduction and misunderstanding defines the reception of Italy's contentious Romantic movement.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the political value of African American literature through an examination of Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama. Prior to their careers as elected officials, both men wrote books that had been influential in shaping public opinion on the nation's democratic potential as well as on their own personal, political, and presidential qualifications. In 1776, Jefferson coauthored the Declaration of Independence, and in 1787, he published an authoritative ethnography of early America. Meanwhile, Obama released three bestselling books of autobiographical nonfiction and public policy. Evidently, African American literature fueled their political imaginations. Thus, this book looks at African American literature's role in political imagination and political action—to the extent that it can facilitate social change—and political action's role in the African American literary imagination.

This chapter examines the problem of legal interpretation in constitutional protections of privacy, including the Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection and due process, and the Fourth Amendment right requiring probable cause during police searches and seizures of persons and property. It argues that legal interpretations of these privacy rights and the policing such rights delimit both rely on the fantasmatic pursuit of an escaping image, the racial profile, to enforce the universal democratic value of personal sovereignty. The fantasy of colorblindness appears in this doctrinal context as a constitutional gaze that both creates and obscures the racial profile in the imaginative domain of producing legal meaning.

The chapter investigates new perspectives that have emerged in four different fields of memory studies focusing on (1) the social and cultural, (2) the technological, (3) the literary and the artistic, and (4) the biological and cognitive dimensions of memory. After surveying how the traditional storage model dissolves in each of these domains, new visions of remembering and forgetting are outlined that reach beyond the archive. Although all these developments are taken to be part of one comprehensive cultural process—the chapter, therefore, sets out with a review of developments in social, cultural, and technological fields—particular attention is given to developments in neurocognitive psychology and other neurosciences of memory. It becomes obvious that even here, in the scientific heartland of an archival understanding of memory, novel views take shape. The chapter ends with a discussion of future multidisciplinary memory research.

This chapter examines John Dryden’s career as a biographer of ancients such as Plutarch, Lucian, Virgil, and Polybius. More specifically, it looks at Dryden’s relation to biography in early modern England and how he used life writing to reflect on literary identity and inheritance as well as politics and literary imagination. It also considers Dryden’s disinterestedness as a biographer in order to explore the relations among writing, society, and politics; how that biographical disinterestedness is linked to other aspects of Dryden’s work; and the role of disinterestedness within the greater domain of subjectivity. Finally, it discusses Dryden’s capacity for disinterestedness by citing one of his works, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, and how he reconciled the different positions that he took on the language and lives of ancients.

The Epilogue considers the broader political and interpretive implications of reading for consolation against the recent backdrop of intense methodological self-scrutiny in literary and cultural studies. It also examines the historical and sociocultural coordinates of the phenomenon of ‘discrepant solace’ this book has charted across borders of nation, genre, and style. With a meditation on Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), the Epilogue reflects on the metacritical ramifications of attending to how writers confront the challenges of living with and writing about emotional worlds that appear to evade articulation. This is a struggle for adequate representation that the book as a whole has tried to trace, one in which consolation’s affective and ethical contestability enters the dramatic precincts and formal textures of contemporary writing—in ways that require criticism to keep pace with what literature can do in situations that would seem to herald its inadequacy.