This chapter reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a circular bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Mosteghanemi’s novel imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts a transregional geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together. A self-conscious heir to the transregionalism described in this study, Mosteghanemi retains its Arab scale to great commercial success but gently critiques its collective, male Arab voice. Through the voice of her male narrator, Arab literary constructions of meaning over Algeria are revealed as homosocial exchanges between male intellectuals, bonding them across distance and rivalries. In Memory, literature’s interpretation of Algeria emerges as an autobiographical task, revealing and narrating an Arab intellectual subject to himself and his likenesses.

Chapter 6 introduces the concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, and hybridity, each expressing a different approach to the transformation of the female body. Plath’s poems frequently seek inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which she interrogates the powerlessness of women who transform from human to vegetal form. The chapter situates Plath’s poetic narratives among her female contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and even Margaret Atwood, who rely on feminist retellings of classical myths to question concerns about women’s autonomy and social position. The chapter outlines Plath’s employment of the concept of shapeshifting, associated with witches and folkloric beliefs, to reflect on the liberatory powers the animal form (often flying creatures) offers to women. It also argues that Plath experiments with the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in one of her most well-known poems, ‘Ariel,’ which portrays an imaginative flying motion as transformation.

Given everything that we know about Latin literature as an outgrowth from Greek, about the persistent habit of Roman poets of fashioning their works as always and pervasively in dialogue with Greek, and more generally about the grounding of Roman elite education in Greek, shouldn’t we reasonably expect some actual surviving poetry in Greek from our canonical Latin poets? With just enough interesting exceptions to prove the rule, such poetry is conspicuous by its absence. In early modernity, in contrast, an analogously deep and learned engagement with an older literary and linguistic tradition (in this case Latin, now in the ‘Greek’ role), coinciding with the development of newer vernacular possibilities, leads to a situation in which poetic publication is possible either in the newer language or in the older one, or sometimes in both at the same time. If (say) Petrarch or Milton can have a bilingual poetic oeuvre, why not Virgil or Ovid? The chapter offers some close-up exploration of this ‘blind spot’ in ancient intertextual behaviour before taking a look at one late, partial, and spectacular exception, involving the fourth-century CE poet Ausonius.

The conclusion reviews the evolution of transregional Arabic literature from its emergence during the Algerian War of Independence to its transformations in the twenty-first century. Decolonization catalyzed a new literary practice that sought to express Arab nationalist solidarities and critique emergent forms of oppressive power – including those exercised in the name of Arab collectives. The conclusion touches on the ways authors grappled with the faltering of revolutionary hopes and rise of new cultural hegemonies in the present century, notably the establishment of the Gulf as a major new hub for Arabic literature. The author notes the ironic reception of the decolonization generation and its concerns in the contemporary Arabic novel and the queering of Arabness in diasporic literature. Revisiting a key theme of the book, the conclusion highlights literature’s evolving work to imagine, engage, and contest shared political experiences across the Maghreb and Mashreq. The chapter concludes by affirming the ongoing political vitality of calls for linguistic and cultural pluralism in Algeria, as exemplified by the Hirak protest movement.

The half-century prior to 1914 was not just a belle époque of world fairs and art nouveau; it was also a period of increasingly contentious international relations, characterized by the developing force of public opinion. Patriotic humanities scholars acquired a new role as public intellectuals, ‘explaining the ways of history to men’. The French–German debates over Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 were a formative moment in the longer time-frame of alternating lost wars between 1804 and 1918, marking the crystallization of French revanchism and German triumphalism. These debates became the breeding ground, paradoxically, both of Ernest Renan’s seminal and still authoritative ‘voluntaristic’ theory of national identity and of a type of chauvinistic propaganda that reached almost hysterical levels in 1914. The fervent jingoism of the Great War, fomented and rationalized by learned disquisitions from prestigious academics, marks the zenith of nationalism as a force in European relations. One committed participant, Emile Durkheim, recognized that self-righteous patriotism could lead to something like national narcissism.

This chapter introduces the varied, intense, committed, unruly and, above all else, deeply political attempts to fashion a definitive scientific account of poetic production from 1880 to the present. It shows how, when one casts their eye back on nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary history, criticism was not just written by literary critics. It was also an activity undertaken by scientists – by mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, statisticians, public rationalists, early computer scientists, educationalists and other generalist intellectuals seduced by the power of scientific rationality. This chapter then rehearses the major arguments of the book, noting, first, how professionalised literary criticism was shaped by this search for a science of verse. Second, it outlines how a series of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, theorised how their poetry could produce a form of knowledge removed from the hegemony of scientific rationality. To do this, the chapter outlines a theory of the epistemology and political power of poetic artifice.

At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together telling examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of a culture inspired by the national interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and ‘unpolitical’ presence, nationalism can shape-shift between Romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter introduces the anti-colonial ideology of Arab nationalism, which in its popular form established a transregional culture of resistance to oppression and injustice. Progressive writers of the decolonization generation, the author shows, mapped their new literary system’s imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed it must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” The chapter then discusses the key concepts of Arab scale and transregionalism. It outlines their nuanced entanglements between national and world literatures, and notes the significance of embedded, internal scales that texture and differentiate the system under study. Overall, the chapter argues that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

The epilogue provides a summary of the book’s main conclusions, followed by an overview of the key developments in the translation of the classics in the decades after 1580 and their continuities and discontinuities with the period covered by the book. It highlights the translation of more openly oppositional or subversive texts and the publication of complete translations of the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, often in folio format with extensive scholarly apparatus, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that the vernacular literature of the later Elizabethan period drew on translations of the classics produced in the middle years of the sixteenth century not just as linguistic and literary models but also for their topical application of ancient texts to Tudor England and intervention in contemporary political debates that contributed to the development of the public sphere.

This chapter studies the creation of Algeria as a topos of transregional literature during the War of Independence (1954–1962) on the pages of the Beirut-based literary and political journal al-Ādāb. This process relied on gendered imagery of suffering Algerian bodies, notably the FLN fighter Djamila Bouhired, who became an Arab nationalist icon following her imprisonment by the French. Arabic transregionalism imagined Algeria as a palpable expression of Arab nationalist rhetoric on Arab revolution. This led al-Ādāb authors to critique Jean-Paul Sartre, insisting on the Arab, rather than global, scale of Algeria’s decolonization. In al-Ādāb poetry, I show that contributors took for granted that fuṣḥā, as anti-colonial transregional print medium, would be the vehicle of postcolonial Algerian literature. Al-Ādāb thus elided complex realities of multilingualism in Algeria, taking for granted, and even viewing as inevitable, the “restoration” of fuṣḥā as a sign of Algeria’s proto-Arab identity. The chapter reads al-Ādāb’s editorial production of itself as transregional journal, including the insertion of advertisements, debates, and exchanges to map circulation networks. I detail the journal’s efforts to recruit Algerian contributors to educate transregional publics on the country’s history and culture and demonstrate its support for the new FLN state after independence.

Using Carter’s textual relationship with Saussure and Derrida as a starting point, this chapter will examine the writing of two other “literary” female authors and their narratological engagement with incest and difference with regard to Derridean différance. This will include a discussion of A.S. Byatt’s writing of incest and the assertion of familial class difference in Morpho Eugenia (1992). Similarly in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), there is also a social and cultural hierarchy of difference, which is expressed through the telling of incest. By linking the difference of both the incestuous and the separateness of the notebooks a reading of transcription will suggest that incest does not only fill the abject space but comes perilously closer to home.