Focusing on William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) and related essays and tourist writing of the 1810s, this chapter explains how he adapted traditional views of Anglican churchyards as sacred commons where local community was composted and cultivated over time, even as dislocation and erasure of rural communities, urbanization, and religious diversification undermined ties between churchyards and local belonging. The chapter interrogates how Wordsworth re-membered the geography, residents, and species of the Lake District within and around an idealized Anglican churchyard that was based on the one near to him in Grasmere yet loosened from denominational boundaries. He did so to reclaim local interspecies and semi-egalitarian lifeways among small landowners and their environments perceived to be threatened by extractive, colonizing capitalism. He nonetheless nostalgically distorted and risked denying agency to those re-membered, and uneasily suggested that agents and beneficiaries of capitalist empire might become conservators of traces of formal local lifeways.

Spenser and Shakespeare also diverge in portraying intellect. Alma’s stately tour strikingly contrasts Lear’s impassioned self-stripping, shedding housing, clothing, and sanity with a shivering fool and demon-haunted beggar on a stormy waste. Alma shows the hierarchic harmony of belly, heart, and brain. Lear distraughtly reacts to raw nature, wounded self-love, anguished severance of bonds. The contrary depiction of intellect is evident in temptings. Spenser’s patterned sinning recaps Eden’s triple tempting, a doctrinal trope so awkwardly used by Shakespeare in Macbeth 4.3 that the scene is often cut. Spenser’s temptings (the Sansboys, Despair, Mammon, Acrasia) learnedly allude to most epic temptings. In striking contrast is the experiential subjectivity and psychic complexity of Shakespeare’s temptations. Divergent use of intellect also appears in moral counsel. Spenserian heroes are educated to achieve virtue, but in books 1-6 moral advice schematically shrinks in scope – intellective authorities in 1 and 2, equivocal passional advisors in 3 and 4, problematic sensate counsel in 5 and 6. (Would this development reverse in books 7-12?) Shakespeare’s moral authorities show a contrary development: early farces of parents and friars (notably Polonius), counselors who grow by suffering in the tragedies, artfully effective counselors in the romances.

Emphasizes a spectral blending of Famine and World War II imagery in Sebastian Barry’s novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), which argues against Irish neutrality. I define and measure the effect of spectrality in Barry’s fiction by focusing on the ghostly (tropes, modes, themes, and forms that bring multiple histories and fictions into dialogue with one another) to trace the way in which Barry crafts a Famine subtext that functions as a critique of Ireland’s non-engagement. Eneas Mcnulty employs imagery that conjures the history of the Famine into the historical space of World War II, and can therefore be read as invoking that nineteenth-century Irish trauma as rationale not for neutrality, but engagement.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the history of the grotesque in visual art and literature together with historical and theoretical accounts of the grotesque. It traces the way in which the different approaches to writing contemporary fiction have their roots in the tradition and discourse of the grotesque. The book is devoted to the late Angela Carter, who mixed fantasy and politics to spectacular effect in her fiction, which is shot through with the grotesque. It considers the hallucinating characters, monstrous metamorphoses and disorientating play with perspective and scale that all point to the importance of the grotesque within Will Self 's fiction. The book looks at the growing prominence of Toby Litt as marking a new development in the contemporary British grotesque, with his fiction crossing different genres and exhibiting diverse stylistic approaches.

Demonstrates the ways in which two thematically and structurally similar novels, Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You (2001) and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), complicate popular uses of the Famine narrative in arguments on both sides of the debate over Irish independence. By calling forth ghosts from the Nineteenth Century to expose both intentional and unintentional misrepresentations of the Famine (imagery, ideological meaning, and political mandate), O’Faolain and O’Connor redefine modern Ireland in terms of hunger and dispossession, revealing a more complex national narrative and a more cosmopolitan national identity.

A look at Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) and Anna Burns’s No Bones (2002), novels in which child narrators relate their personal accounts of the Northern Troubles using the Gothic’s spectral modes and tropes. The Gothic mode in contemporary, postcolonial Irish writing generally serves to shadow the progress of Irish modernity. These novels expose the underside of postcolonial Irish nationhood: the ongoing struggle for a thirty-two county Republic, and recurring debates about whether Protestantism or Catholicism constitutes the ‘True’ national character. By re-imagining ancestral voices that speak of absolution rather than retribution, Dean and Burns break from popular political and social discourses that draw upon Ireland’s ghosts as a way of justifying recurrent political violence. Both authors employ the familiar trope of the past-haunted present from Celtic folklore, but reverse typical outcomes: haunting is imagined as a productive vehicle for moving the nation out of the past rather than for keeping it there. By focusing on the domestic consequences of the Troubles, specifically trauma experienced by children, both authors imagine a new generation of Irish individuals struggling to re-gain self-possession while remaining dedicated to a more egalitarian vision of Northern Irish society.

This chapter listens closely to songs released by Saweetie (‘My Type’ and ‘Tap In’), Latto (‘Muwop’), Erica Banks (‘Buss It’), and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (‘W.A.P.’) in 2019 and 2020. Each of these tracks employs sonic elements of trap music while sampling classic hip-hop and club anthems. Beyond just flipping samples, these rappers flip hip-hop sexuality itself on its head, transforming cuts that position Black women as objects into songs that center Black women’s desire and agency. We listen to these tracks not only in relation to one another (and to the sources of their samples) but also in the context of Sylvia Wynter’s influential analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Riffing on Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with Wynter, we theorize the work of these rappers as “demonic sound,” as they make themselves present in music that had previously absented them.

This chapter considers how Katherine Philips responded to traditional literary forms and ideas in the poems of the Tutin manuscript. It focuses on the two genres for which she was later to become best known: retirement and friendship poetry. Philips was more than willing to engage with the gendered challenges of literary tradition. In responding to men's sentences, she learnt to produce her own. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf meditated on the difficulties faced by women of earlier centuries in trying to imagine themselves into English literary tradition. The chapter examines the history of English-language women's poetry between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. The terms for modern scholarship on Philips's poetry of rural withdrawal were set by Maren-Sofie Rostvig in her classic study of seventeenth-century retirement literature, The Happy Man.

What Stradivarius and Steinway are to classical music, and Fender and Gibson are to rock and roll, the E-mu SP 1200 and AKAI MPC samplers are to hip-hop. As beat makers in the mid 1980s experimented with newly available digital samplers, E-mu Systems and AKAI introduced their all-in-one sampler. During the so-called Golden Era, the SP 1200 and MPC developed a reciprocal relationship with hip-hop music that saw the specifications of the machines in conversation with the aesthetics of the music. Through analyses of ‘South Bronx,’ ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell,’ and ‘Unbelievable,’ the chapter addresses how these two machines became primary instruments of beat making. In addition, these examples reveal how each machine developed mythic legacies within hip-hop culture that have long survived their commonplace usage, and how these machines shape an aesthetic consideration of the “sound” of hip-hop beats to the present day.

This chapter examines hip-hop’s rhyme history. With attention to examples from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Big Daddy Kane, and Busta Rhymes, it identifies three main modes of rhyme: “normal,” “extraordinary,” and “impossible.” Popular during hip-hop’s early development, normal rhymes clearly and predictably mark line endings. Sometimes dismissed as unsophisticated, they invite the listener to experience the depicted experience as communal. Extraordinary rhymes concentrate normal rhymes’ infrequent technical flourishes into a defining characteristic. They play intonation against line breaks and feature denser, more complicated multisyllabic rhymes such as mosaic and forced rhymes. They aim for a conspicuous virtuosity. Impossible rhymes are often performed at a formidable speed, without any clear sense of where lines start or end. Riddling passages also cannot be conclusively understood. While normal and extraordinary rhymes encourage their listeners to remember and perform them, impossible rhymes aim for irreproducibility.

Christian Platonic hierarchy shapes Spenser’s epic: a hierarchic family triad, three stages of fall and of recovery. Spenser radically revises this allegory, blaming man, whom woman lovingly seeks to cure. Books 3-5 show Britomart’s chaste power defeating all males, freeing woman from mastery and self-induced suffering. The intellective allegory of books 1 and 2 reform higher reason, then lower reason, each in tripartite form: a triadic family, triple temptings, three-phase training of the spiritual and then natural bodies, ending with a triadic Eden. The passional allegory of books 3 and 4 is again transcendent, then immanent. Britomart brings female ascendancy by chaste skill with arms and providential goals. She unfolds in three heroic Graces (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret). In these passional books the male counterparts (Artegall, Marinell, Timias, Scudamour) are paralyzed; virtuous reunion comes by female prowess and endurance, aided by mothers and female deities. A female theology rests on virginity and marriage, immaculate conception, Trinitarian identity, epiphanic unveilings, female endurance of a Passion. The sensate allegory of books 5 and 6 subject even Gloriana/Mercilla and Arthur to confusing materialism. Does the ontological ‘dilation’ of books 1-6 (narrowing images of Duessa, Timias, and satyrs-salvages) show despondency about Irish terrors, or prepare for reversal in books 7-12?