Chapter 2 argues that the early modern theater’s techniques for the production of narrative suspense emerged from its cultivation of spectators’ phenomenological uncertainty. Attending to moments of temporal suspension in history plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, William Shakespeare’s Richard II, and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, the chapter shows that theater practitioners regularly aimed to resist the unrelenting forward momentum of live performance by grinding dramatic time to a halt. Narrative suspense was especially hard to come by in the history play, which emerged as a new genre in the 1590s by dramatizing well-known chronicles of English kings. But the playgoers who flocked to theaters to see these stories of succession were living through a succession crisis of their own, for Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir rendered England’s dynastic future crucially opaque. The theatrical invitation to unknow England’s past trained spectators in speculative thinking oriented toward their own politically uncertain future. History plays transformed the anxious wait for Elizabeth’s successor, that is, into the pleasure of theatrical possibility.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

The function of the beginning of a story. You don’t have to get the opening right before you can make any progress. Different kinds of openings. Starting with exposition. Starting in medias res. The necessity of having a sense of an ending while writing. Judging when to stop. The importance of how the story lands, rather than where it ends. The role of tension in a story. The cliffhanger. Arousing the reader’s curiosity. The importance of pace and how to sustain it. Methods of interrogating your writing for tension and pace.

‘Each chapter needs a narrative function. If you can’t summarise the purpose of a chapter you would be wise to check that it really does have a function. The other way to interrogate your writing for pace and tension is to ask yourself: What does the reader want to know at the end of this chapter?’

Crystal Parikh’s chapter on dissolution takes up narrative fragmentation to thematize outward-moving fictions of “interruption, isolation, suspense, and precarity.” Starting with Valeria Luiselli’s interviews with migrant asylum-seekers, Parikh argues that a defining feature of contemporary literature is its formal techniques of “dissolution and the fragment as vital aesthetic and stylistic forms to convey the splintering effect that global modernity in the twenty-first century induces.” From Luiselli to George Saunders’s short stories and novels by Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward, among others, Parikh argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative techniques have been remixed by contemporary authors who draw on realism and experimentalism to tell stories of ongoing and unresolved dislocation and vulnerability.

In the first decades of printing, medieval romances were edited and printed en masse, sometimes in luxurious in-folio formats. Sixteenth-century works of long prose narrative also drew on Classical epic and the dialogue. Notwithstanding these significant classical and medieval influences, there was no formal theorization of the novel in the sixteenth century—and indeed no single term to designate 'the novel' in this period. This absence of rigorous theorization and terminology contributed to making the period's vernacular prose narrative a privileged medium for literary experimentation: Rabelais's works were of course experimental in the highest sense, but other forms were also forged and promoted: in particular, sentimental and pastoral forms as well as the humanist model of the Greek novel based on Heliodorus. This period also forged new devices such as suspense and serialization, which would become signature features of the novel in the nineteenth century. Through all its incarnations and in the midst of formal experimentation, long prose narrative in this period opened a new horizon for reading: as a hobby, a pleasurable activity to fill the idle moments of life.

Chapter launches project of taking Naso’s desire seriously. Reads Naso’s desire alongside Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, focusing on Naso’s desire to script scenes in which he is at the mercy of his girlfriend; his fascination with the blurred boundary between art-objects and flesh, especially visible in simile-clusters; his interest in castration; and the recurrrence, starting with the poems on Corinna’s abortion, of a “maternal fantasy” in which he plays alternately the mother and the baby. Key poems: Amores 1.7, 2.19, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15

Chapter takes up masochism at the level of literary form, focusing on Naso’s resistance to closure and desire for perpetually renewed agitation , as manifested in 1) his beloved verse form, the elegiac couplet (in which the cadence of the hexameter is twice suspended); 2) his finessing of possible endpoints within the book, especially at book junctures; and 3) his self-defeating deployment of rhetorical persuasion (a failure that ensures the need for more rhetoric). Key poems: Amores 1.1, 3.1, 1.4, 1.5, 3.7, 1.11