This critical introduction presents a biographically structured overview of MacDonald’s writings, providing readers with a sense of his cultural and critical contexts. The editors delineate the three phases of MacDonald’s life and works (early, major, late) and identify the main stylistic and thematic emphases of each. The final section engages influential interpretations of MacDonald, by C. S. Lewis and others, arguing that what has sometimes been perceived as failures of MacDonald’s art is better understood as a kind of ‘generative awkwardness’ resulting from his aesthetic of ‘noble unrest’. The chapters that follow are gestured to as doors into MacDonald’s disruptive vision.

A product of the materials available in the New Europe Group’s archive, which includes personal diaries and journals, this chapter is able to provide a more intimate look at three of its most influential female members: Winifred Gordon Fraser, Cecil Eastgate, and Rose Graham. The mini-biographies of these women give us a deeper understanding of why women were drawn into the federalist movement. All three were well-educated world travelers who had a vested interest in advocating for women to have greater agency and self-sufficency. Their personal backgrounds also provide valuable context for assessing their views on gender and the significance of women in politics found in Chapter 8.

Using examples from Bishop’s letters and diaries, as well as more recent theoretical accounts, the introduction explores various meanings of the word ‘style’ and their pertinence to Bishop’s work. The introduction highlights the predominance of biographical criticism in works on Bishop (and other twentieth-century writers) and instead argues for the importance of stylistic criticism. This chapter goes on to delineate two broader trends in contemporary literary criticism – historicist on the one hand, formalist on the other – and outlines their shortcomings in understanding the nuances of particular poems and literary works. The chapter then outlines this book’s focus on several aspects of style across Bishop’s entire oeuvre, including cliché, simile, allusion, and correctio. The introduction ends by arguing that aesthetic evaluation and judgement are central to the responsible and rigorous practice of literary criticism.

This chapter introduces the key issues raised by the poetry of Hipponax. After assessing the available data on his life – his date, place of origin, and the implications of his name – we examine three life stories told by ancient sources, which potentially illustrate ancient receptions of his ‘autobiographical’ poetry. Then we enter the world of Hipponax’s poetry by discussing his reported feud with the sculptor Boupalos and the other characters, places, and objects that populate it. We sketch a novel approach to the question of its fictionality, while also paying due attention to the other interesting questions posed by the corpus. We conclude by looking at some elements of Hipponax’s poetic language: his play with ‘foreign’ words, his fondness for bizarre compounds, his use of similes, his reception of epic, and his uniquely creative use of metre.

The book’s challenge is to carve out a literary-critical approach that brings all sides of Lawrence’s verbal art forms together as a recognisable whole, but not by the traditional means of defining an underlying philosophy. Instead a bio-bibliographically informed approach traces Lawrence’s developing imaginary, his unfolding intellectual project, along highways and byways alike until his broader oeuvre-in-process becomes the object of study. The book analyses work-versions, where significant developments are materially witnessed, rather than confining attention to the works’ published forms. Zooming in to focus on changed patterns and wordings on this manuscript or that typescript is followed by a pulling back to survey the wider patterning and stylistic shift. Cross-currents from his reading, marriage and friendships circulated through his contemporaneous writings in all its forms. This shifting repertoire of image and idea was increasingly organised by a structural habit of projecting polarised fundamentals into staged encounters with his subject matter. A text-gambler, Lawrence would trust this performative approach to dictate the movement of idea and attitude.

The introduction justifies telling the story of the forgotten bully Louis Bieral. His life was extraordinary not only because of his interactions with famous people, but also because of his wide range of adventures. Moreover, his brutal career helps us understand the importance of private, nonlethal violence to the operation of nineteenth-century America.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

Although everything we know about Ignatius Sancho’s early life comes to us from a short biographical sketch written by the lawyer Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) as a preface to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African (1782), much of this is unsubstantiated and some appears improbable, exaggerated, or even invented. This chapter accordingly offers a critical reassessment and attempts a historical reconstruction of Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho.” It offers a possible version of events that may explain Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s childhood journey from Cartagena to London. It argues, however, that the challenge of verifying much of “The Life” remains insurmountable at present and we can better understand “The Life” as a rhetorical intervention in the early phase of the British abolition campaign rather than as an unproblematic record of historical events. Jekyll’s “Life” may offer the reader, this chapter concludes, a moral rather than a literal truth.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

The musicological literature has tended to focus on Giulio Strozzi’s career as a librettist, and on his participation in three academies, Ordinati in Rome, and the Incogniti, and its musical offshoot, the Unisoni, in Venice. In this chapter I discuss two biographies published about Strozzi during his lifetime, one of them quite well known (present in the Le Glorie de gli Incogniti), the other one less so (from Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca Imaginum Illustrium). I will highlight the means by which these biographies nuance Strozzi’s time before he became one of Venice’s most noted librettists. I offer new insight into Strozzi’s time in Rome (circa 1601–1615), and suggest that, contrary to his published Incogniti biography, he most likely never earned a degree in law from the University of Pisa.

This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and its model of logical context. Against readings that see it as purely anti-contextualist, the chapter shows how logic functions as a form of context in early Wittgenstein. Through biographical and historical context, it demonstrates how the Tractatus emerged from and responded to specific intellectual environments, while setting up the book’s broader argument about parallel developments in anthropology and philosophy.

This introductory chapter presents the main topics and orientations of the book. Its subject matter is the invention of technology, that is, the study of techniques in the twentieth-century human and social sciences – as grasped through the fundamental contributions made by André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986). Biographical background on his life and career highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s wide-ranging scientific productions in such fields as ethnology, museology, orientalism, art history, palaeontology, behavioural psychology and prehistoric archaeology, and indeed the archaeology and anthropology of techniques. The breadth of these contributions reflects a diversity of interests, but also a form of eclecticism or ‘in-discipline’. Alongside long-standing investments in documentary and experimental practices, his writings were structured around several conceptual keywords (‘techniques’, ‘milieu’, élan vital, Homo faber, ‘liberation’, ‘exteriorization’, chaîne opératoire) which varied over time and in function of their uses. In addition, Leroi-Gourhan’s extensive archives make it possible to address the literary ambitions and intellectual practices of the scientist in action.