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This chapter focuses on the case of the literary spectator. It argues that the notion of the case not only is helpful for thinking about the relation between an externalized point of view and its subject, but is also a term that is most apposite to the sentimental tradition in question. It is there in Adam Smith's language about how, in the act of sympathetically imagining ourselves in the place of the other, we put ourselves in the case of the other. This language is to be understood in relation to Smith's critique of another model of the case as it is found in the tradition of Jesuit casuistry. The discussion then goes back to mid-eighteenth-century Britain, when the sentimentalization of the case in the medium of print first established the basic parameters of a new literary mode.

This chapter first explores the narrative and representational challenges posed by the First World War and the ways in which soldiers and civilians imaginatively overcame those challenges. To do so, they turned to every mode on the literary spectrum: epic, romance, tragedy, elegy, pastoral, but also, and most importantly, the picaresque. The picaresque is a messy mode for a messy, shifting, chaotic set of realities that were experienced differently by different people at different moments and under different pressures. The chapter next places the picaresque framework developed in the book within a discussion of other scholarly approaches for understanding the literary and cultural production of the First World War. The picaresque framework complements the rich mosaic of literary devices, motifs, and structures explored by literary scholars Paul Fussell, Evelyn Cobley, and Martin Hurcombe and by cultural historians Leonard Smith and Jay Winter. Collectively these scholars’ works make us attentive to the richness of literary and cultural patterns reworked in wartime and postwar writing and offer a robust set of tools for understanding the stakes and strategies of representation during the Great War.

In 1682, Lady Henrietta Berkeley eloped with her brother‐in‐law Ford, Lord Grey, one of Monmouth's closest personal friends and an avid follower in his rebellion. The scandal, much‐watched in the popular press and the subject of avid contemporary gossip, found its most memorable representation in Aphra Behn's Love‐Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), arguably the first novel in English. Love‐Letters draws on the salacious details of the Berkeley–Grey affair, including details that emerged in the subsequent trial, and places the story of sexual perfidy and perversion squarely in the context of the Monmouth Rebellion. Against that backdrop, Love‐Letters delineates the complexities of late seventeenth‐century tory sensibility and attacks what Behn saw as the faithlessness and treason of exclusion‐era Whig ideology. Familiar seduction topoi and gender roles are satirically revised, while sexual encounters are shown consistently to complicate the categories of rape and seduction, undermining the regime of “force or fraud.”

This chapter demonstrates how the Simple Stories came from Langston Hughes’s desire to create a working-class character for a working-class audience. In a 1945 article for Phylon magazine titled “Simple and Me,” Hughes explained the origins of his popular creation. According to him, Simple grew from a conversation he had been having for many years of “myself talking to me” or “me talking to myself,” but which had taken place in many forms, “from poetry to prose, song lyrics to radio, newspaper columns to books.” Few scholars have fully addressed the many literary modes in which Hughes operated.