William Trevor's short story, 'Lost Ground', from After Rain, conforms to Aristotle's vision of tragedy because it depicts a truly horrendous situation inside a family in Northern Ireland over a two-year period, between 1989 and 1991. 'Lost Ground' revolves around a Protestant family named the Leesons. In 'Lost Ground' Trevor utilises historically significant dates that touch upon the pain, trauma and division in the history of Northern Ireland. The truth, though, is that peace is not entertained by the 'community' that is described in 'Lost Ground', and any sense of 'brotherhood' gives way to fratricide. In a modern prose version of an Aristotelian tragic tale, Trevor shows that for those who cannot escape repeating the past, the idea of forgiveness and peace is neither possible nor desirable.

Early modern women poets' search for cultural authority and poetic voice involved a vexed, sometimes contradictory relationship to literary models. Classical poetry was especially awkward for women writers to accommodate and imitate, for a variety of social and cultural reasons. The poetry of Lucy Hutchinson, nee Apsley, places the vexed relationship to the exemplary authority of mostly male classical authors in a particularly intriguing light. Hutchinson's impulse to scriptural explication is unlikely to have troubled any biblicist contemporaries. But in turning to Ovid of all writers to satisfy it, her poetics seems out of line with contemporary reassertions of the primacy of scripture, and more like older humanistic attempts to reconcile classical and biblical creation myths. An allusion to the Metamorphoses illuminates a tension between Hutchinson's humanist poetics and scripturalist theology. The scholarly approach to interpretation of scripture can be detected in her Genesis narrative.

The story of 'Mistris Sanders' concerns the true-life murder of the London merchant George Saunders in 1573 by George Browne. The wofull lamentacion of Mistress Anne Saunders, which she wrote with her own hand, being prisoner in newgate' has survived only in a manuscript copy, in two hands, probably transcribed from a male-authored print text that is now lost. Indeed, a 1580 account of the crime, A View of Sundry Examples, Reporting Many Straunge Murthers, focuses solely on George Browne's motivation and actions in killing George Saunders, with Anne Saunder. Extending L. Hutson's arguments to popular poetry particularly that linked to historical crimes the chapter suggests that a similar awareness of the need for evaluation attaches to the exemplarity of the female plainant in gallows confession. Gallows confessions continued to circulate into the seventeenth century, and all gallows confessions did not result in a transformation from negative to positive exemplarity.

Hip-hop’s relationship to disability has been as long and complex as the culture itself. This chapter discusses the multiple ways that disabled artists and audience members have engaged, remixed, and transformed hip-hop through their work, activism, and building of communities. It considers prominent disabled hip-hop artists (like Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys), the presence of disability-specific aesthetics and imagery in subgenres like hyphy or “mumble rap,” and tenacious questions of ableism within the music (and the music industry), and it explores the work of disabled people outside the commercial music industry to expand and redefine the culture. Most specifically, it traces the development of Krip-Hop Nation, which emerged from linked movements for racial and disability justice to gain an international presence for disabled rap artists and fans.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the grotesque in contemporary British fiction from a number of different perspectives. It explores how the grotesque's status as non-classical results in a paradox where it comes both before and after the establishment of classical norms. The book outlines a tradition of the grotesque in European art and literature of which the contemporary works under discussion are a part. It illuminates the economies and 'classical' nature of the aesthetics of realism, and the strength such economies still hold is demonstrated by the tenor of much of the contemporary criticism. The book examines a particular strand of the grotesque in contemporary writing.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

This chapter traces the transformative literary, scientific, and cultural events of the 1810s that shaped the period’s fascination with making life out of death. It was during this tumultuous decade that debates about materialism and vitalism came to a head. Literary and scientific writers alike boldly repositioned the human mind as dependent on the body. But this brought with it a host of anxieties. What kind of immortality can reside within the embodied mind, susceptible as it is to material dissolution? What kinds of fertility – intellectual and otherwise – can withstand mortality? For some writers in the 1810s, these questions may lead darkly, as in Frankenstein, to ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’; but for others, and especially for poets, that same grave becomes a site of regeneration. This chapter argues that the 1810s witnessed a form of Romantic decadence centred on the human body, one in which newly vocal philosophies of materialism combined with radical poetics to briefly reimagine and even celebrate the function of decay.

Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

This considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities in the interwar period. Lesbian novels by Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann, and Clemence Dane are scrutinized in the context of sexological debates about perversity and abnormality, advice literature on female friendship and arguments about lesbian modernism and female masculinity. I develop queer readings of the ‘apparitional lesbian’ and question whether the lesbian heroine can be rescued from isolation. Such arguments are related to the normalising and coding of same-sex desire in autobiographical accounts.

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.

This chapter completes the analysis of Achebe's writing, emphasising the centrality of balance and dialogue over orthodoxy or political commitment in his work. Referencing Nwando Achebe's stalwart defence of her father's fiction and her work on the female warrant chief Ahebi Ugbabe, it considers the changing gender consciousness that runs through the author's work as a whole. Never uni-vocal, never content to succumb to ‘The One Way, One Truth, One Life menace’, it concludes by characterizing Achebe's fiction, in his own words, as an ongoing campaign of resistance to ‘The Terror that lives completely alone.’

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

This also considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities but focuses on the 1930s, and incorporates debates around the older woman. It examines female professionalism and tracks cross-generational female alliances, seen as essential, if precarious, in the progress of feminism. Novels by Virginia Woolf and Winifred Holtby are used to reflect on the progress of the professional spinster and the new older heroine. The 1930s novels of Vita Sackville-West are read as widows' stories through Terry Castle's concept of the post-marital.