This chapter demonstrates how debates around redundancy, the old maid and the surplus woman in the 1850s began to create a prototypical spinster heroine. The Victorian widow in fiction and autobiography in the mid-Victorian period can be seen to operate as a disruptive, contradictory presence, often bound by her affinity to the figure of the aunt, as illustrated in autobiographical writing by Margaret Oliphant. Advice literature for women and discussions in the feminist press are used to mobilise queer readings of the clever daughter, female communities and the attractions of 'imaginary widowhood' in Gaskell's Cranford, Bronte's Villette and the lesser-known novels of Charlotte Yonge.

Rap has long enjoyed a generative relationship with spoken-word poetry, one that can be traced back to the politicized orientations and aesthetic preferences that distinguished the Black Arts poetry and early spoken word of the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, this chapter argues that differences between rap and spoken-word poetry are as salient as similarities. Rap’s relationship to the spoken word only starts to acquire political and strategic importance at the point at which gangsta rap – with its hyper-profanity and alleged nihilism – comes to prominence. Amid the antiblack racism and structural dislocation of Reagan’s America, rap in the spoken word can be seen as emblematic of hip-hop’s intra-cultural politics of uplift versus negativity. Yet, despite such claims, this does not suffice to settle the matter of the elevated and profane within rap. For in rap, carnality, irreverence, and high-mindedness are the alternating currents and tensions that make hip-hop penumbral, the goad to its intra-politics.

Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease were conceived by Achebe as a saga spanning three generations of an Igbo family and their struggles to survive successive waves of Nigerian nation building. Reading them as interlocking parts of a single narrative reveals much that is otherwise missed about the novels and the way they comment on the damaging effects of colonialism. If pre-colonial culture in Igboland is seen as having its problems – domestic violence and infanticide being notable among them – Achebe's portrait of a modernity dominated by corruption, in which young women must prostitute themselves for advancement or undergo botched, backstreet abortions as the heroine of his second novel does, works to suggest that these have not disappeared, but merely taken new forms. Far from being expressions of nationalist commitment, as critics have often claimed, these novels offer a deeply troubled assessment of Nigeria's past and prospects.

Looking to politically committed artists, this chapter asks how hip-hop has been shaped in both its form and its substance by a revolutionary critique of racial capitalism. After setting out the antinomies of Black capitalism and Black Marxism via listening to a song by Kendrick Lamar, the chapter demonstrates how hip-hop codifies its own forms of racialized and proletarian radicalism. To so do, and moving in roughly chronological order, it listens to a handful of songs by Public Enemy, The Coup, and Noname, reading their lyrical content and describing their musical form as a response to the interlock of race and class under capitalism.

This chapter explores the influence of Jamaican music and culture on the origin and development of hip-hop in the US. With roots reaching back to Jamaican sound systems and Nyabinghi drumming, hip-hop inspires a new flowering of Afrofuturism as Black resistance to colonial authority. The example of Jamaica’s Maroons, Afro-Caribbean freedom fighters, clarifies its strategy of cultural resistance: to seize and secure space for a Black future of living free. As hip-hop’s early innovators – DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Rammellzee, among others – adapt the Jamaican sound system to new colonial territories, they use music, dance, raps, and tags as weapons to create spaces of freedom in the oppressive world of the Bronx in the mid 1970s. This legacy of Afrofuturism informs the ensuing history of hip-hop, half a century of Black musical creativity that extends from Brother D and the Sugar Hill Gang through X Clan, Public Enemy, and NWA to Dr. Octogon, Deltron 3030, Janelle Monáe, Ras G, and beyond.

The word griot has been linked with hip-hop since its early days in the 1980s, but it is a fragile connection. Initially used by French travelers to West Africa who thought they were using a local term, it refers to hereditary praise singers, instrumentalists, and oral historians. Although there is some overlap between what modern-day rappers and griots do, there are also some significant differences, especially in their social status and roles in society. If rap has distant origins in Africa, dispersed via the transatlantic slave trade, and come back transformed, then how can we think about the highly specialized skills and roles of griots in Africa, their inspirations in the diaspora, and their intersections with rappers? Tracing the institution of griots in western Africa and charting how the term took root and expanded in the US will help us appreciate their congruencies and incompatibilities with hip-hop.

A case study that underscores the dual political and artistic identity of Postcolonial Irish authors in action in order to delineate where Irish studies scholars stand with spectrality as a critical lens for analyzing the present and coming fiction about twenty-first-century Ireland. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949, trans. 1953) fluently theorizes this dual aesthetic and political identity, thereby bridging the high modernism of James Joyce and the postcolonial spectrality of Haunted Historiographies’ Post-Celtic Tiger authors.

This chapter outlines the major influences which inform Achebe's emerging consciousness as a writer, strongly contesting the orthodox reading in which nationalism and commitment are taken as the keys to his work. It examines Achebe's career as one of the most influential media professionals of his time, a context that sheds much light on his literary writing. It explores his work in relation to both its key literary intertexts, and as part of the burgeoning interest in historical reclamation that accompanied decolonisation in Nigeria. Finally, the chapter examines the extraordinary role played by Achebe in helping to establish African writing on the international scene.

This chapter explores the ways in which William Trevor's liberal humanist premises condition his response to issues of historical consciousness, ideological commitment and political violence, with reference to a selection of his short stories and novels grouped under three headings. They are: The Colonial Mindset; The Colonial Legacy; and Unfinished Business: The Northern Irish Troubles. Trevor's flirting with postmodernist ideas about the indeterminacy of truth in The Story of Lucy Gault concedes as much. In early works such as 'Beyond the Pale', 'Attracta', 'The News from Ireland', Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden, his characters are trapped in history. In Felicia's Journey, The Story of Lucy Gault and 'Against the Odds', however, he opens up the possibility of change, new hopes of ending the cycle of violence, based on reaffirmation of the humanist belief in the individual as at least semi-autonomous.

This chapter discusses 'On the situation of Highbury' as a starting place to reconsider the place of the estate poem as one among several interlocking discourses of land, property, place and money in Restoration London. It aims to use close work on Katherine Austen in order to look again at the estate poem and tease out the conditions under which writers approached place at the Restoration. Accurately described by its editor, Sarah Ross, as a 'borderline literary text', 'Book M' offers a litmus test of life, money, land and literature as the 1650s become the Restoration. The overlapping concerns about 'dwelling', ease, labour and good estate management found in Austen's poem and 'To Penshurst' have been elucidated by Pamela Hammons. Austen's 'Book M' discloses the world in a very different way from that audible to economics alone.