Itineraries of poetry across language boundaries do not necessarily entail actual travel on the poet’s part. However, writers ancient and modern did go on excursions to the lands associated with the poetic traditions with which they interacted – as did readers too. Chapter 5 resumes discussion of two poets who appeared in Chapter 4, Joachim Du Bellay in sixteenth-century France (via the French Antiquitez de Rome, the Latin Elegiae, and other works) and John Milton in seventeenth-century England (via the bilingual double book of 1645, its Latin half framed by dedicatory testimonia from learned Italians and by the career-punctuating Epitaph for Damon). For both, language choice would have been an issue even without their ventures abroad; but both use their time in Italy to explore, sharpen, thematize, and problematize transcultural issues of language and identity. Is the passage to Italy a celebration of linguistic cosmopolitanism or a test of linguistic loyalty, a journey home or a journey into exile and alienation? What kinds of language question do poetic travellers to Italy negotiate, and what Rome, or whose Rome, do they find?

Music was an important carrier of national inspiration and national sentiment: not only as a high art form (conservatoire-trained professional musicians performing for paying audiences) but also as a platform for participatory performance and rousing conviviality. For the former aspect the sample case is that of Franz Liszt, who, after an early cosmopolitan life, rediscovered his Hungarian roots and celebrated them in his rhapsodies. Those rhapsodies in turn provided a template for any composer, anywhere in Europe, who wanted to compose in a national vein. The more convivial aspect of music is surveyed by way of the choral movement, so widespread in the nineteenth century. Choral societies were an important aspect of nineteenth-century sociability, spreading from city to city, linking these cities in mutual visits and federative festivals, and drawing on the nationwide availability of a repertoire often patriotically celebrating the nation. The nation-building aspect of the choral movement, with its inspiring and mobilizing powers, is strikingly illustrated by the appropriation of the German format of the Sängerfest by the non-German populations of the Baltic countries for their own national purposes.

The Introduction situates Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural within the current scholarship of Plath studies along with the recent new publications of Plath’s works. It introduces the purpose of the book and reviews the previous, often misguided approaches to Plath’s relationship to the supernatural and the occult. The Introduction emphasises the new approach of bringing together literary studies with the framework of the early modern witch trials and historical studies on witchcraft to interrogate the full extent Plath engaged with the political, cultural, and literary heritages of the European and American witch-hunts. Across seven chapters, this book reviews the way in which gender, magic, and power intersect in her poetry and prose contextualised within the post-war era.

During the 1990s, such inherent difficulties in recalling and expressing abuse were heightened by the so-called 'Memory Wars', as the Recovered Memory Movement (which advocated the validity of women's rediscovered recollections of trauma) conflicted with the theories of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which maintained the tendency for (misguided) therapists to implant experiences in their (generally female) patients' minds). Working within this often volatile critical context, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) and Kathryn Harrison's Exposure (1993), together with Rachel Ward's film version of Newton Thornburg's Beautiful Kate (2009), embody the tense interplay between the 'real' and the reconstructed that characterises debates about incest and memory. All three texts engage with the ambiguities associated with recounting incest, not least through their status as fictions - as fabrications. Recalling and reworking the very notion of False Memory Syndrome, Smiley and Harrison reclaim and rewrite male-authored stories, implanting them with the perspectives of subjugated daughters.However, over a decade later, Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate presents something of a turning point, as this critically-acclaimed film marries explicitness and artistry, and, in doing so, confronts openly the memory of incest.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

Chapter 1 situates Plath’s work within McCarthyism (anti-Communist witch-hunt) and looks at her knowledge of the Salem witch trials, from American literature to her encounters with contemporary political discourses. The chapter examines Plath’s poems inspired by the early modern witch-hunt, such as ‘Witch Burning’ and ‘The Times Are Tidy,’ and considers her employment of the witch figure as a metaphor for political and gender nonconformists during the Cold War, seeking inspiration the trials of witches and the Rosenbergs. The chapter then comparatively reads Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) and Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible (1953), arguing that Plath draws on the concept of witch-hunt as an abuse of institutional power, which was parallelled with McCarthyism and the return to Puritanical morals in post-war America. The chapter reviews Plath’s historical, literary, and political engagement with the legacies of the Salem witch trials and offers an understanding of her poetic deployment of the witch figure.

Chapter 4 discusses the literary, cultural, and political influence of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Faust legend in the works of Plath and her contemporaries. The chapter examines Plath’s textual engagement with Faustian plays and the way in which she seeks inspiration from the themes of the texts from her juvenilia until her late poetry. The historical, religious, psychoanalytical, and political interpretations of demons, demonic possession, and diabolism were present in post-war discourses, borrowing the vocabulary from the well-known play about a black magician and Mephistopheles. The chapter revises over-simplified narratives around Plath’s use of vocabulary associated with diabolism to show her knowledge of the subject that influenced her and demonstrates that American poets, such as Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, and John Berryman also employed Faustian themes in their poetry. It concludes that the Faust legend had significant role in post-war literature and culture, re-interpreting the meaning of diabolism and sin within the mid-century political landscape.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

Chapter 2 follows the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef to independent Algeria, where he began a lifetime engagement with the Maghreb as a site for quotidian poetics to reflect on Arab political experience. A key figure is his fictional, Algerian alter ego, L’Akhdar ben Youssef, through whom Youssef developed the Mashreq’s Algerian topos to engage events like the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). I situate Youssef’s transregional poetics in dialogue with the Syrian Baʿthist thinker Mutaʿ Safadi, who argued that Arabic literature and philosophy should ground the scale and slogans of Arab nationalism in social experience. The chapter compares transregionalism’s texturing of fuṣḥā with daily life with Algerian critiques of Arabization by leftist intellectuals Sadek Hadjerès and Mostefa Lacheraf. For these Algerian thinkers, the renewal of Arabic signified the promise of decolonization as a plural, popular expression of the multilingual nation. The chapter concludes with Algerian Kabyle linguist Mouloud Mammeri’s critique of the neo-colonial nature of Arabization.