This chapter addresses critical issues which lead to the formation of a vocabulary for the discussion of reading practice and experience. It addresses the nature of the evidence including the approach to the formation of case studies and associated issues of how to employ empirical evidence in a non empiricist mode. The chapter also presents some key concepts discussed in this book. The book examines some of the ways that a manuscript itself provides extensive evidence for the reading process in terms of performance, intertextuality, and the connections between word and image. Investigation of moral reading takes as its main focus a collection of popular short stories known as the Gesta Romanorum. The book is guided by manuscript evidence for the organisation of a Middle English miscellany and the making of thematic connections between texts within it.

This chapter explores how the idea of a gap in being that is both inexpressible and yet deeply haunting comes to inhabit Frantz Fanon's response to the fiction of René Maran. In their different ways, both Fanon and Maran struggle with an image of black life as one haunted, as one, in effect, spellbound by a racist imaginary. In fact, embedded in Fanon's dialectic of love, recognition and desire is the sexual stereotype of the black man driven by the effects of internal and external prohibitions and decrees, displaced on to the typically '"maddening" blonde'. Like Maran, Fanon uses the mother to symbolise those anxieties or gaps introduced by the phobic fantasy of the 'nègre' and, as such, he also seems driven to exclude her from his writing.

In Peau noire Frantz Fanon contests the appropriateness of certain aspects of Paul Sartre's essay. Peau noire is difficult for Whites to read because of the intensity with which Fanon describes his personal experience of racism. Fanon explains that behind this masochism is the acknowledgement by Whites that, if they were black, they would not show any pity to their oppressors. Fanon's response to Sartre in order to highlight what it shows about the role Fanon was willing to give to this 'ami des peuples de couleur'. Although Sartre identified Negritude as 'an anti-racist racism', a phrase that Fanon employed for himself, by declaring that Negritude gives way to the idea of the proletariat, Sartre located Negritude as a stage in the dialectic and thereby robbed Fanon of his Negritude.

In this chapter the author situates Peau noire within the broader post-war reassessment of race and the human condition. The last pages of Peau noire are a hymn to disalienation, authenticity and freedom which could have been written by a pure disciple of Paul Sartre. Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive is itself a powerful exposé of the trap for the Jew posed by the universalising and particularising mechanisms at work in modern French society. However, Frantz Fanon is aware of the drawbacks of Sartre's approach. In his discussion of Sartre's 'Orphée noir' he objects bitterly to the way in which Sartre devalues blackness by defining it as simply oppositional to whiteness. Fanon is also intensely aware of the universalist foundations of Sartre's Hegelianism whose master narrative, the dialectical unfolding of history, situates 'race' as simply a stage on the path of progress towards a disalienated society.

The Introduction traces the history of the pastoral mode from Theocritus to the Renaissance, and its afterlife to the present day. It examines the social and political implications of pastoral, and its allusive application to many sectors of human experience. It relates this record of history and cultural politics to the wide range of literary forms incorporating the mode, as well as allied forms and genres, and related conventions like the Golden Age and the Earthly Paradise. Through this comprehensive discussion, it attempts an evaluation of the pastoral tradition as a whole, and separately of its major vehicles and exponents. In a separate section, it traces the means, routes and forms by which pastoral texts circulated in manuscript and print.

This chapter focuses on the heterogeneous juxtapositions which bring together diasporic Jewry and the history of anti-Semitism with the colonial struggle and anti-Black racism. It looks at the intertextual relationship between Frantz Fanon's and Jean-Paul Sartre's works. The chapter argues that both Sartre and Fanon slip between actuality and discourse in a bid to understand the impact of a dominant racial imaginary on Blacks and Jews. Fanon compared assimilated European Jews and Blacks in Peau noire as examples of racial groups which internalised racist structures. In his L'An V de la révolution algérienne, Fanon similarly notes that Jews, especially when part of the bourgeoisie, colluded with the colonial apparatus in Algeria. Fanon had served as part of the Free French forces in a war against racism and fascism and had lived through Nazi discrimination against the handful of Jews in Martinique and the larger Jewish population in Algeria.

This chapter suggests that Frantz Fanon's conception of the 'where to begin' forecloses a French Creole conception of the past and by doing so suggests a conception of the collective that condemns the Creole communities to the perpetual hell of alienation. His conception of 'where to begin?' is an awakening which takes the form of a psychological tabula rasa. The event takes place in the man of colour's unconscious. His liberation occurs on two levels: emancipation from himself and from the white world; and a swift and trenchant rupture with the old world, for there is no emancipation without a violent break. Peau noire is full of pleas for swift action, though Fanon thought that it was too late for the Antilleans. Creolisation results from the tension between two phenomena. They are the presence of strong contrasts and differences, and the creation of a unity.

This chapter examines the nature of some popular fictional literature with the intention of understanding more about reading experience. It provides the set of surviving stories centred on one of the knights of King Arthur's round table: Gawain. The chapter describes the Gawain stories and assesses some general points concerning the various versions, their similarities and differences. It considers the matter of their popularity, and some important issues about the relationships between a popular story and its form, with specific reference to ideas of orality and literacy. The chapter presents a manuscript case study which addresses specific issues of how the evidence for reading practice and experience may be elucidated for one version of the story. The manuscript case study is based on The Carle of Carlisle which is found in a Middle English miscellany housed in the National Library of Wales.

In the course of the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, three terms come to the fore of British politics in a renewed and controversial way: institution, racism, unconscious. It is a stark and painful claim, one of several in which Doreen Lawrence draws together the fact of violent racism and the failure to protect, to value the life of , black men, women and children in contemporary British culture. First published in 1952, Frantz Fanon's Peau noire remains one of the most persuasive and controversial attempts to think the unconscious in relation to the institution of racist violence. The pressure of the sexual stereotype marks the work of that violence in Peau noire, driving Fanon towards an interpretation of phobia that veers between insight and cliché, suspending the concept of Negrophobia between different representations of anxiety in psychoanalysis.

This chapter provides a historical reading of the examples of racism in 'metropolitan' France that Frantz Fanon cites and comments upon. Of earlier Antillean francophone poets, Fanon says 'ce sont des Blancs', as they were too fascinated by the mirage of French assimilationism. The chapter analyses the significance of Peau noire for our understanding of the various cultures of colonial racism. As the 1950s progressed, the 'comparativist' themes would gain wider currency, and many of the developments help to throw more light on Peau noire itself, and on Fanon's subsequent political trajectory. Fanon's text served as a powerful counter-discourse to the reassertion of 'colonial republicanism' in post-war France, where the end of the Vichy regime could be invoked in an attempt to legitimate the more 'benign' paternalism of the French Union.