Bishop – like Tennyson before her – was professedly ambivalent about, and sometimes antipathetic to, critics who sought ‘literary references’ in her poems. Tom Paulin takes Bishop’s lead when he writes that she ‘avoids recondite allusion’, and many recent critics have followed him. In this chapter, Bishop’s poetry is shown to be profoundly and variedly allusive. This chapter examines Bishop’s relation to the burgeoning knowledge industry of the 1960s and ’70s, and showcases the wide range of authors – including Luis de Camoes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Robert Frost – to whom she alludes. This chapter considers in particular Bishop’s relationship to T. S. Eliot, as both an alluded-to source text and as a model of allusive practice. The chapter uses and then complicates Eliot’s distinction between allusions that confirm their sources’ effects, and those which are used in contexts that are ‘pointedly diverse’. John Hollander’s distinction between quotation, allusion and echo also frames the discussion of Bishop’s allusions in relation to loneliness, identity, posterity, and artifice.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

Concerned with Emerson’s aging and the authorial integrity of his later works, critics traditionally discounted the compositions Emerson delivered or published after 1860. Important editorial scholarship, however, has opened new prospects for reconsidering the intellectual vitality of late Emerson, now accessible in The Later Lectures and in the publication of the final volumes of the Collected Works, including Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Building upon the critical reconsideration of Emerson’s considerable engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, this chapter identifies Emerson’s rhetoric as a significant concept in, and creative context for, the sometimes collaborative and often iterative “recomposition” of the later work. Three rhetorical figurations of Emerson’s late styles – metonymy, analogy, and translation – are traced across works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and the unfinished Natural History of Intellect.

The Coda asks whether Scotland’s undeniable imaginative presence in Macbeth disproves the book’s thesis of erasure. It argues that editors read into Shakespeare’s sources the contrast between England’s political civility and Scotland’s dysfunctional barbarism that is one effect of this brilliant tragedy. Holinshed’s account of Edward the Confessor does not present a society less barbarous than that of Holinshed’s Macbeth, which derives Hector Boece’s elegant Livyan history. Shakespeare evacuates the political-theoretical content of his Scottish sources, substituting the figure of Scotland as a mother unable to nurture her children. Macbeth thus pathologises the Scottish double plight of jurisdictional subordination and alien status with respect to England. The Scottish failure of nationhood becomes a rooted sorrow that even English sovereignty cannot cure.

Chapter 2 considers the war led by Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset. Somerset saw the Scots as culpably resistant to God’s providential plan for an imperial ‘Great Britain’ with Edward VI as emperor. Metalepsis, a reversal of cause and effect, governs Somerset’s rhetoric and military strategy. His 15,000-strong amphibious army entered Scotland in 1547, heralded by a proclamation declaring that Scots who did not recognize the peaceful aim of this invasion would be the cause of violence against themselves. This preposterous logic is perpetuated by modern reference to the wars as ‘Rough Wooings’. The chapter analyses Somerset’s innovative amphibious strategy (fortifying the Forth and the Tay) in terms of the incoherence and hidden violence of his favoured metaphor of Britain as an island fortress walled by the sea, garrisoned by Anglo-Scots love. It interprets Hans Eworth’s arresting painting of Sir John Luttrell rising, naked, from the Firth of Forth. The chapter lays the ground for understanding what is wrong with the modern critical assumption that ‘Great Britain’ was James VI and I’s project and what is at stake in the occlusions that such a misreading of history permits.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

This chapter examines recurring instances in the Brontë juvenilia where the siblings intervene in their narratives as omnipotent author-gods, called the ‘Chief Genii’, who reshape the imaginary world by writing it. I trace this narrative and play practice back to its roots in the pseudo-Oriental tales of The Arabian Nights and James Ridley, but also argue for its wider significance to the literary-theoretical metaphor (employed by writers from Gustave Flaubert to Roland Barthes) of the author as divine creator of the narrative reality. In counterpoint to existing scholarship which tend to emphasise generic differences between the juvenilia and Brontë’s mature work, I offer a reading of The Professor as a continuation of the Genii authorship within the realist novel, and thereby defend Brontë’s reputation as an author of vicarious ‘wish-fulfilment’. Brontë provides a starting case for this book’s larger argument about the alternative uses of the novel as a fictional reality, rather than a historical representation, an aesthetic work, or an ethical parable.

In the metalepsis situated at the centre of the text, the God of Love disorients the reader with the revelation that the romance that the latter was sure of having read has not yet been written and that it will be the work of two authors of which the first is in danger of dying and the second has not yet been born. In the verses in question, which take their inspiration not only from ‘Parisian philosophy’ but also from the ‘legalists’ of Orléans and the teachings of Joachim of Fiore (by means of Gerard de Borgo San Donnino), an authorial hypostasis takes place (or a supposition according to Scholastic terminology), which is expressed through the triad ‘Guillaume de Lorris’ – ‘God of Love’ – ‘Jean Chopinel’, and which provides the romance’s underlying unity, its allegorical mysteries, and its modalities of enunciation.