The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

This chapter explores how the revision of amatory poetics creates a throughline across all seven volumes of poems jointly written by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the pen name of Michael Field. This chapter argues that Michael Field’s revision of the tradition of love poetry, and specifically the Renaissance tradition of courtly love poetry, opens a space for same-sex eroticism, feminist revision of male-centric tropes and the male gaze, and even calls into question the lyric voice as a construct. Bradley and Cooper’s poems complicate the lover/beloved binary through voice and poetic form, shaping the love lyric into a more apt vehicle for their own unique voice and position.

This chapter examines how ancient Egypt was represented across Michael Field’s oeuvre, contextualising such depictions via the wider literary culture of the fin de siècle, from the aesthetic and decadent movements to popular fiction. In comparison to the classical world, which held a more privileged place in education and literature, Egypt symbolised the exotic, dark, and ‘other’. Through close readings of Michael Field’s Egyptian sonnets, their verse drama Queen Mariamne, and references to Egypt in Bradley and Cooper’s diaries, the chapter explores the erotic allure of ancient Egypt and the limits – in Bradley and Cooper’s minds – to its queer potentialities. It also investigates how mummified remains, goddesses, and figures like Cleopatra VII were used to navigate themes of power, desire, and gender, ultimately positioning Egypt as a fertile ground for reimagining gender fluidity, femininity, and transgressive sexuality around the turn of the century.

This chapter examines Michael Field’s queer aestheticism by focusing on their complicated relationship to Walter Pater. It explores how Bradley and Cooper, as women writers and same-sex lovers, adapted Pater’s notably queer aesthetic philosophy to craft their own distinctively modern poetics. They shared Pater’s vision of aesthetic modernity, characterised by an emphasis on personal sensation, sexual dissidence, and intellectual rebellion. However, they also critiqued his masculinist biases and his shift towards respectability later in life. Through their poetic works, diary, and intimate correspondence, they creatively revised Pater’s ideas, positioning themselves as both heirs and innovators within the queer aesthetic tradition and building upon his insights to realise a broader and more inclusive artistic legacy.

Between 1921 and 1924 Edgar was in Baghdad, and Winifred in St Albans. Through Edgar’s eyes, we see Baghdad during the tense early years of the British ‘mandate’ in Iraq. Now a company director, Edgar’s talents were exploited by Baghdad elites, co-opting him as an ‘agent of imperialism’, as Britain dominated the new Iraqi constitutional monarchy, while the Baghdad Anglican church used him to run its new parish. Through Winifred’s eyes, her public profile flowering, we see her expatriate adjustment to middle-class suburban life, with two stepsons and two daughters occasioning stepmothering anxiety. Immersed in the local Anglican church and feminist organisations such as the National Council of Women, alongside the local Conservative association, her conservative politics co-existed with progressive and cosmopolitan social attitudes. The love correspondence is integral to their expatriate identity, with insights into early twentieth-century middle-class marital sexuality, explicit details of a playful sexual relationship underpinned by spirituality, and a description of consensual birth-control practices. Winifred’s sudden departure to join Edgar in Baghdad, placing two young daughters, unhappily, in a small, boarding school, marked the urgency of their passion, but also the strength of a companionate marriage, a product of shared expatriate experience.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

The so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus highlights the importance of ethical living if Israel is to be holy as God is holy. This chapter discusses the historical-critical arguments around the composition of the Holiness Code but focuses mainly on bridge Leviticus creates between the holiness of Israel’s tent and God’s tent. Ethical purity is as important as ritual purity in Leviticus and requires holiness in every aspect of Israel’s life.

Despite strong opposition within the army and society, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was created in 1942. Although segregated, it attracted many African-American women in search of income, emancipation or recognition of their contribution to the nation. The first two black companies were assigned to Huachuca to take over bureaucratic duties and traditionally female tasks. They were welcomed both as rivals and as possible sexual partners. Most of them turned this experience into an opportunity to assert their political, professional, and sexual agency. Their photographic and written documentation of their military experience at the fort offers a unique female gaze on the infantrymen’s training experience.

Much of the existing analysis of women in O’Casey’s plays concentrates on the women in his earlier work; this chapter examines the representation of younger women in O’Casey’s later plays, revealing how O’Casey presented a strongly contemporary feminist outlook which sought to re-position his audience’s understanding of female sensibility. The chapter analyses the way in which, by questioning theatrical form and critiquing patriarchal control of women, O’Casey enabled experimentalism in dramatic form to go hand in hand with a willingness to evolve and develop a progressive expression of female sexuality.

When the Abbey Theatre faced rioters in 1926 during the first performances of The Plough and the Stars, the theatre managers decided to continue with the scheduled seven-night run and then to revive the piece three months later. However, despite that boldness in the face of opposition, O’Casey subsequently found himself confronted with various kinds of official and unofficial censorship, both in Ireland and elsewhere. This chapter details that censorship and describes its effect on O’Casey’s work and reputation. The chapter examines O’Casey’s work in the theatre, and also examines censorship of O’Casey’s nontheatrical work, such as Windfalls, I Knock at the Door, and Pictures in the Hallway.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

This chapter examines gender and sexuality in the writings of Sean O’Casey, through analysis of three works that demonstrate his preoccupation with the way women’s sexuality intersects with money, class, and sex work. As well as examining The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its reception, the chapter analyses two of his lesser-studied works – the short story ‘The Job’, and the prose poem ‘Gold and Silver Will Not Do’ from Windfalls (1934) – and the chapter highlights certain connections between the short-story writing and Eileen O’Casey’s personal experiences.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

On 18 October 1932, the young Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote a letter to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy, drawing a distinction between conscious, agential events, and reflex actions. The tension between the conscious, agential subject, and automatic bodily events comes to constitute a key concern in Beckett’s writing, which dedicates meticulous attention to those bodily functions that fall between intentional and non-intentional acts, such as sexual reflexes, breathing, habitual actions, and even, at times, the production of speech itself. In staging this tension, Beckett is in search of a literary form to accommodate an emerging understanding of the self that has its origins in a finding of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century neurology: the discovery of the autonomous nervous system as independent or near-independent from the conscious, intentional subject.