Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee’s novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe’s great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee’s novels and Swift’s works—nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee’s attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee’s oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year.

Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland in 1919, and although she grew up in England and lived there all her life she always identified herself as “Anglo-Irish”. The Red and the Green (1965), set in Dublin in the week leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916, is Murdoch’s only historical novel. This work is in many ways concerned with the same kinds of personal drama that animate her other fiction, weaving historical events into the fabric of a complicated narrative involving several members of an extended Anglo-Irish family. Although the characters are fictional, there are many small and unobtrusive hints of her own personal identification with the material scattered throughout the text. We discuss these echoes in the work, and also consider what led her to depart in this single case from her usual practice of writing novels set in a more or less contemporary time and concerned only with fictional events. We propose that Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916” is an important element in the structure of Murdoch’s novel, and consider the consequences of the pervasive influence of Yeats on this novel in the light of Murdoch’s still contested status as an Irish novelist.

Mrs Curren, in Coetzee’s Age of Iron, is a retired Classics lecturer. Greek and Roman mythology, and Latin and Ancient Greek, are part of her consciousness. Her humanistic, Enlightenment sensibility is shaped by a liberal education which could be regarded as irrelevant in the South Africa of the novel, and which could therefore function as a symbol of the marginalisation of western liberal culture in Africa. Christian and biblical discourses are also important in the novel. Latin, in the form of phrases taken from the Vulgate and the Catholic liturgy as well as from classical texts, is woven through the texture of Mrs Curren’s consciousness: her mode of thought and expression tends to the etymological and the allusive. In this paper I will consider the part these two discourses, classical and biblical, seemingly incompatible in some ways and overlapping in others, play in shaping the character of Mrs Curren. I will consider how the Latin language in her internal monologue and speech mediates her interactions with other characters and her reactions to particular events in the novel.

In Jane Austen’s novels, musicianship is mainly the preserve of the female sex. The main role of the true gentleman, as far as musicianship is concerned, is to be an appreciative listener. The mark of a hero is listening with enjoyment and attention to the woman who has attracted his interest. More than once, this is the shortest route to falling in love. In the late Georgian period, English masculinity was in crisis, as a result of various social and historical pressures, including the Enlightenment, the rise of the merchant classes, and the long-lasting European wars. Various models of masculinity were proposed by writers throughout the eighteenth century, in parallel with the models of femininity endorsed in the female conduct literature of the time. In this paper I explore the interplay of music and masculinity which resulted in the marginalisation of musical practice in the life of the English gentleman in the society of the time, and how that is reflected in Austen’s fiction.

Jane Austen was a practising musician, and my intention in this paper is to investigate the significance of that fact for her writing practice. Beginning with the comparison between Elizabeth and Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, I will consider contemporary attitudes to virtuosity and aesthetics in an attempt to understand the implications in Austen’s fiction of the distinction between ‘playing well’ and ‘being listened to with pleasure’. My recently completed project of cataloguing in detail each piece of playable music in the Austen Family Music Books facilitates the study of Austen’s personal musical taste in the context of her extended family and, more broadly, of English musical culture in the late Georgian era. I attempt to bring together Austen the musician with Austen the writer, both in her knowledge of the musical repertoire of the time and the language of music more generally.