This chapter explains how the emotionally expressive motions of characters can reveal their unmet psychological needs, which cultural and economic conditions do not allow them to fully acknowledge. These movements and the environments in which they unfold evoke subgenres of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel including the marriage plot, the Gothic novel, the Victorian bildungsroman, and the sensation novel. These episodes featuring characters’ emotionally expressive motions invite us to understand these subgenres in a new light, as narratives that depict characters’ unfulfilled needs and respond to those of anticipated readers. The introduction situates this approach both with respect to recent work in novel studies and the earlier approaches of reader response theorists. The chapter also offers an extended interpretation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, oriented around Clarissa’s expressive motions as she runs away from her family with Lovelace. This moment can be seen as the origin of episodes of getting lost.

This essay summarises the working relationship between composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and writer William Plomer (1903–73). After listing their completed collaborations – Gloriana (1953), Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966), The Prodigal Son (1968) – and abandoned projects, the essay turns to broader points of comparison and particularly to Britten and Plomer’s shared sense of ‘exile’, which the author argues informs their independent and collaborative work. Plomer’s shift away from the novel as a genre parallels Britten’s away from full-length opera. Their choice of subject, particularly in their work together, shows a movement away from realism. They cultivate a sense of humour marked by irony, and they increasingly pursue an economy of artistic material. These shared traits may point to the artists’ sense of ‘estrangement’ and may also be indicators of ‘late style’.

From John Dryden’s essays onward, satire has persisted in English critical discussions as the domain of male writers. Dryden’s contemporary, Aphra Behn, has, accordingly, been excluded from consideration as a major satirist despite critics’ ongoing recognition of satiric elements in her works, especially her plays, and the reclamation of a couple of her obviously satiric poems. This essay examines masculine critical traditions set by Dryden and his successors along with their considerations of Juvenalian, Horatian, and Menippean satire in order to expose the forces shaping conceptions of satire as an inherently masculine genre. It simultaneously foregrounds the role satire plays in shaping eighteenth-century genres as it frames Behn as a major satiric writer. Ultimately, this essay places Behn alongside her male contemporaries, as satirist and – through satire’s deconstructive forces – as facilitator of new generic modes, notably literary criticism, miscellany poems, the novel, and comedy of manners. Just as she was second only in productivity to John Dryden, Behn rivaled him in witty social commentary on literary traditions and in challenges to those traditions by producing varied works that were satiric in their fabric.