How do writers work? The differing habits of seven great authors are examined in this collection. Writers often meditate on what physical situations they need to do the work in hand. A room of their own, bills, bed, procrastination, regular meals, Benzedrine and beer, office routines, walking and riding, even prison, can be machines that make them write. Trollope got 2,000 words done every morning, watch on the table. Clare composed en pleine air, jotting on his hat rim. Wesley's hymns came to him on horseback. The Bronte sisters paced round adrawing-room table. Donne was dismally prompted to write by nappies. Johnson needed the printer's devil knocking at his door. On a grand scale, city planners try to entice the creative classes into a creative area: while at alocal level, readers have a magical sense that putting themselves into the bodily position of a writer may allow them to join in her planning and plotting. The essays in this volume examine the working habits of seven greatauthors, from 1600 to today: Jonson, Milton, the Bronte sisters, Trollope, Oliphant, and Auden. There are also interviews on the creative environment with the Poet Laureate of Great Britain, the British Library's Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts, the Director of the Hay Festival, research fellows at Stratford and the Globe, and a poet-web-blogger. CONTRIBUTORS: STAN SMITH, ELISABETH JAY, N. JOHN HALL, STEVIE DAVIS, PETER C. HERMAN, FARAH KARIM-COOPER, KATE RUMBOLD, MICHELLE O'CALLAGHAN, ADAM SMYTH, ANDREW MOTION, JAMIE ANDREWS, ROBERT SHEPPARD, PETER FLORENCE

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias.Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias. Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.

There is a kind of conscience some men keepe,
Is like a Member that's benumb'd with sleepe;
Which, as it gathers Blood, and wakes agen,
It shoots, and pricks, and feeles as bigg as ten
Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan see the conscience as only partly theirs, only partly under their control. Of course, as theologians said, it ought to be a simple syllogism, comparing actions to God's law, and giving judgment, in a joint procedure of the soul and its maker. Inevitably, though, there are problems. Hearts refuse to confess, or forget the rules, or jumble them up, or refuse to come to the point when delivering a verdict. The three poets are beady-eyed experts on failure. After all, where subjects can only discover their authentic nature in relation to the divine it matters whether the conversation works. Remarkably, each poet - despite their very different devotional backgrounds - uses similar sets of tropes to investigate problems: enigma, aposiopesis (breaking off), chiasmus, subjectio (asking then answering a question), and antanaclasis (repetition with a difference). Structured like a language, the conscience is tortured, rewritten, read, and broken up to engineer a proper response. Considering the faculty as an uncomfortable extrusion of the divine into the everyday, the rhetoric of the conscience transforms Protestant into prosthetic poetics. It moves between early modern theology, rhetoric, and aesthetic theory to give original, scholarly, and committed readings of the great metaphysical poets. Topics covered include boredom, torture, graffiti, tattoos, anthologizing, resentment, tears, dust, casuistry, and opportunism.

Early modern private prayer is skilled at narrative and drama. In manuals and sermons on how to pray, collections of model prayers, scholarly treatises about biblical petitions, and popular tracts about life crises prompting calls to God, prayer is valued as a powerful agent of change. Model prayers create stories about people in distinct ranks and jobs, with concrete details about real-life situations. These characters may act in play-lets, or appear in the middle of difficulties, or voice a suite of petitions from all sides of a conflict. Thinking of early modern private prayers as dramatic dialogues rather than lyric monologues raises the question of whether play-going and praying were mutually reinforcing practices. Could dramatists deploying prayer on stage rely on having audience members who were already expert at making up roles for themselves in prayer, and who expected their petitions to have the power to intervene in major events? Does prayer's focus on cause and effect structure the historiography of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VIII?