U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.

This chapter identifies the intersection between the role of hip-hop music in literary poetry and the operation of poetics in rap by chronicling the parallel histories of the music and the poetic practices developed alongside and in response to it. It traces the emergence of rap from party music, identifies what constitutes poetics in the lyrics and the construction of the music, and clarifies how the music and literary poetry overlap in spoken word, in slam poetics, in TV shows like Def Poetry Jam, and in emerging academic programs and centers.

In late 1914 Lawrence wrote ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, a set of pseudo-philosophical essays. He performs soaring, sage-like meditations on individuality and its impediments: the state, work and money. As art history and Hardy’s novels start to provide resistants to Lawrence’s psychological projections of body and spirit, and of male and female, a freshness and fertility of invention provoke scintillating accounts, almost rewritings, of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the projection of a grand historiography of Europe, with Renaissance art as its pivot point. Empowered by Nietzsche’s daring example, this intellectual experiment is performed on the page without benefit of the truth-restraints of professional criticism. The Rainbow, a novel whose final version he would bring to completion only a few months later, benefited from Lawrence’s new, overweening confidence in rendering the subconscious. His inhabiting of emotions-on-the-page was now intimate and unbounded. Yet the three-generational family-saga form that Lawrence expanded in the final version could not readily accommodate the resulting extremes of emotion within a synthesising intellectual structure.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the ‘non-royal’ (or ‘private’) charter corpus – that is, documents that were issued by individuals other than kings – from Kent, Mercia and Wessex between the 830s and 880s. The chapter provides an overview of this material’s content and its production contexts and processes. Canterbury dominates, since this is where a large majority of the surviving documents comes from, though there are glimpses of other settings too. A significant portion of the material from Canterbury relates to two particular ealdormannic families, though other documents demonstrate that lay and ecclesiastic people of lesser social standing also participated in documentary activity. The picture that emerges is diverse; varying practices and contexts, and different motivations for codification, reflect the richness of contemporary documentary culture. The following important themes are considered too: female participation, the relationship between royal and non-royal documentation, and the varied uses of Latin and Old English.

This chapter traces how Langston Hughes (1901–1967) documented the Black experience in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movemen and some key legacies of the Black world building he pursued by engaging with social justice and political activism. To this end, the chapter details overlooked correspondence to reveal the mentoring Hughes provided to Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Amiri Baraka. These letters illuminate the unmistakable confidence Hughes instilled in both Brooks and Walker while the often overamplified tension between Hughes and Baraka quietens into a spirit of working admiration among equals.

This chapter contributes to the relatively recent scholarly debate on African American ecopoetry, proposing that the history of Black ecopoetry in the United States is one of poetic engagement with the troubled entanglements of Blackness, the natural world, and notions of the human through the lens of Black ecological thinking. African American ecopoetic imagination is situated within the larger universe of Black ecologies, or ways of knowing and being in the world that synthesize vernacular traditions rooted in Black environmental experiences with the Black diasporic intellectual traditions of eco-humanism. In this chapter, I outline some of the calls and responses that shape the African American ecopoetic tradition by exploring how its shared common aesthetic and thematic elements – in particular, the mascon of the tree, strategic identification with the non-human, and concern with environmental justice – function in poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Camille Dungy, among others.

This chapter sketches some broad contours of Black periodical poetry from the years leading up to the Civil War until just before W. E. B. Du Bois founded The Crisis. It considers three illustrative poems published in Black periodicals: George Boyer Vashon’s 1865 “In the Cars,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1863 “The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth,” and Mary E. Ashe Lee’s 1885 “Afmerica.” Recognizing that, for all of their differences, many Black periodicals had the shared goal of making larger and better discursive spaces for African Americans, it studies how poems such as the chapter’s examples enabled Black readers to see themselves in human modes denied by the white industrial publishing complex and to consider crucial questions of Black communities, history, and art. It argues that Black periodical poetry challenged the ephemerality associated with periodicals by creating print practices that were both of the moment and part of a much larger ongoing history; Black periodical poetry thus addressed past, present, and future and revised the idea of poetic “occasion” to intervene in America’s serial “changing same.”

This chapter focuses on the women who pioneered Black Power poetry recordings alongside the male artists whose work dominates critical discussions about the genre. Beginning with Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks’s contributions to Folkways’ Anthology of Negro Poetry (1954), the chapter explores the rapid growth of the genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, examining the work of Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Laini Mataka (formerly Wanda Robinson), Sarah Webster Fabio, and Jayne Cortez. Their records represent women in control: as the leaders of bands, as publishers and producers, and as owners of record labels. Drawing on the inspiration of black music and musicians to infuse popular and avant-garde dimensions into their performances, these recordings catalyze personal and social transformation. Such multifaceted performances of blackness were carried out in the articulation of a dissident black femininity within and against a vigorously ambivalent commercialization.

This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Background

The first legal code of modern Nepal, the Muluki Ain, promulgated in 1854 by Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana, systematized every aspect of Nepalese society, from criminal and religious law to the caste system and property rights, reinforcing existing social structures that benefitted the dominant caste-Hindu elites. Largely influenced by ancient Sanskrit treatises and Brahminical social ideas and practices, the Muluki Ain labeled Nepal's Tamang community, along with several other lower-caste and Indigenous groups, as masinya matwali (enslavable alcohol-drinker) and murmi-bhotiya (people from the border [P. Tamang 2018: 45–46]). This categorization further deteriorated their social status, legally sanctioning their oppression, domination, and strategic exclusion in Nepal. They were converted into mere slaves or bonded laborers and subjected to compulsory labor (rakam) and porterage (Holmberg and March 1999: 6). The Tamang community had to bear the terrible sense of loss of their caste status and remained identity-less almost a century because of the exploitative and exclusionary attitude of the Nepali state toward them. The Tamangs had to wait till 1932, nearly 80 years after the promulgation of the Muluki Ain, to get back their caste status and ethnic recognition. In this regard, A. Hofer (2004) reminds us, “A decree signed by King Tribhuvan and the then Rana Prime Minister Bhim Samser lays down that, instead of the hitherto employed designations Lama and Bhote, henceforth the designation Tamang may be used officially” (Hofer 2004: 125). Although this allowed the Tamangs the permission to write their surname – “Tamang” – and be recognized as an ethnic group with their distinct culture and history, it was only the beginning of a long struggle for equal rights (P. Tamang 2018: 55).