Chapter 2 examines the balance between praise, precept, and criticism in comparisons of the dedicatees of translations with exemplary figures from ancient history. It argues that Anthony Cope’s The History of Hannibal and Scipio (1544) and Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia similarly applied Livy’s History of Rome as a guide to military action in Tudor England, but Cope also made a principled attempt to influence the direction of religious and political policy. The five Plutarchan Lives presented in manuscript to Henry VIII by Henry Parker, Lord Morley during the 1530s and 1540s rebuked the increasingly tyrannical king. William Master’s manuscript Life of Scipio mined the text for military stratagems as well as moral and other lessons. Thomas North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) supported the religio-political agenda of forward Protestants under the leadership of Leicester and Shakespeare’s Roman plays responded to North’s application of the Lives to Elizabethan England in their exploration of masculine martial valour and heroism.

Latin poetry has always been defined by its relationships with poetry in other languages – first with poetry in ancient Greek, more recently with poetry in the European vernaculars. The Introduction defines the book less as a literary history of Latin poetry across languages, as such, than as a set of essays that offer test cases, sometimes limit cases, for such a literary history. What is promised is a book of intertextual juxtapositions, moving between extreme close-ups and broader treatments of intercultural relationality. A special interest is expressed in the possibilities of two-way poetic conversation across languages. The Introduction concludes with trailers for the book’s seven chapters.

This chapter will be twofold. Firstly an examination of the narrative place of incest within both Murdoch’s and de Beauvoir’s work and questioning the role of the ephebophilic attitudes of the central male characters to the younger, less experienced Julian Baffin (The Black Prince, 1973) and Nadine Dubreuilh (The Mandarins, 1954). Both of these texts are informed by philosophical idea of the virtuous and it seems clear that Murdoch takes much from de Beauvoir’s earlier novel. The structure of Murdoch’s work is far more relaxed and this is clearly seen in the style that Murdoch presents us with the sexual relations of the characters whereas de Beauvoir’s work aims to bring the reader to a better understanding of the underlying existentialist position. Is love debased by both Murdoch and de Beauvoir via the taboo of incest to heighten the eventual outcomes of the respective novels or does it form a signifying position that point us toward a new moral reality that developed after the Second World War?Little work has been produced relating these two authors to the other and a reassessment of their work is both timely and necessary.

Ian McEwan’s early fiction delves into the dark drives and desires of ordinary men and women, revealing disturbing realities about the human psyche. McEwan’s psychological probing of deeply disturbed characters reveals how it is often the mundane feelings of inadequacy or failure that compel seemingly ‘normal’ people to commit horrific acts of sexual violence. Within selected short stories in First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and his first novelThe Cement Garden (1978), McEwan horrifies his audience by representing insidious evils that occur through the actions and in the minds of seemingly ordinary men. Reading McEwan’s portrayals of ‘manliness’ is shocking and disturbing not only in his portrayals of rape and incest, but also in the seemingly normal occurrence of sadomasochism, produced and supported by traditional gender relationships.

This chapter reads Syrian writer Haydar Haydar’s Walīma li-aʿshāb al-bahr: nashīd al-mawt (Banquet for Seaweed: Ode to Death, 1983) with Lebanese poet Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse arabe (The Arab Apocalypse, 1980). Banquet is a transregional epic that treats events across Algeria and Iraq, from the Umayyad era to the early 1970s. I trace its epic form through its parody of pan-Arab dictators between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and a virtuoso performance of multiple registers of fuṣḥā. For Haydar, a Mashreq transregionalist who develops the Algerian topos for the bleak 1980s, a 1965 coup in Algeria signified the end of Algeria’s revolution and of Arab, decolonial liberation. The novel depicts Arab politics through an Arab planet that rotates in transhistorical cycles of revolution and oppression. This conceit of an orbiting, closed cycle is key to Banquet’s historical and ontological account of Arab politics. The work of the novel is to reveal transregional history as repetition. In contrast, Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse is read as transregional Arabic literature in French. While her poem speaks for Arab experience through the topos of Palestine and massacres in the Lebanese Civil War, Adnan relationally remaps transregionalism into global sites of violence and injustice.

Engaging with adaptation theory and narrative theory, and relevant contemporaneous critical reviews, this essay textually analyses Newman’s original novel and its television adaptations and considers these in relation to audience reception, as well as to other similarly placed literary adaptations. In analysing the repression of incestuous desire, and the sado-masochistic themes that arise in A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, this chapter also refers to Freudian psychoanalysis, connecting the themes of incestuous desire, and associated guilt-induced masochism to narrative theory in the way that these dual fantasies propel the narrative forward. Finally, this essay comments upon incest as taboo in interpreting audience reception.

The work of Iain Banks has been prominent in exploring the crossing of different kind of borders: national, aesthetic and generic, ontological, gender and class to name but a few. Banks has also been part of a wider preoccupation in contemporary Scottish writing to do with inhabiting border zones, where the border ceases to be an idealised geometric line with almost no width or physical extension, and instead broadens to become a site that one can reside in, the ground against which the figure emerges. The Bridge, along with The Crow Road (1992) forms the background of the chapter. This chapter will illuminate how The Steep Approach to Garbadale’s continuation of and departure from the border explorations and reflections on national identity of his earlier books is rendered through the crucial deployment of the motif of sibling incest in the novel.

Chapter 5 follows Souffles–Anfās editor ʿAbdellatif Laâbi to Beirut in 1970, where he theorized Maghrebi thought within Arabic transregionalism, which he dubbed a Second Nahḍa (Renaissance). The chapter studies his translations of, and commentaries on, Palestinian poetry, particularly by Mahmoud Darwish, as performing dialectical ties between national and Arab scales. For the Moroccan thinker, transregional poetry (or “totality”) amplified readers’ perceptions of a common Arab experience by mobilizing gendered figures of Arab revolt across proper languages. His translations, against conservative ideas of fuṣḥā under the Moroccan monarchy, attested to the revolutionary vitality of Arabic in the Mashreq. Laâbi critically reclaimed Arab nationalism from Frantz Fanon, who dismissed it as a racialized frame for culture under colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. The chapter also theorizes Laâbi’s French-language poems on Palestine and Arab nationalism as transregional Arabic literature in French.

Chapter 5 outlines the way in which Plath’s poetry engages with the language and performance of ritual magic. It introduces the concept of ritual magic that employs ritualistic, incantatory language, such as chants, spells, and ritualistic acts. The chapter focuses on two poems, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Burning the Letters’, that engage with the idea of poetic spellcasting and argues that the poems seek inspiration from the ritual of exorcism or banishing spirits. The close reading relies on the drafts of the poems, highlighting Plath’s attribution of magical powers to poetic language that she often erased from the final versions of her poems. The chapter asks how Plath’s poems interrogate what constitutes ritual magic, engaging with the blurred boundaries between mundane and magical rituals and utilising the powers of poetic language.

The Coda shows how the post-Enlightenment desire for a science of verse has been fundamental to contemporary machine learning technologies. It also reflects on the historical development, ideological commitments and epistemological foundations of the normal scientific study of poetry, both at its inception and in its enduring legacies, inquiring into what is at stake when techno-scientific reason attempts to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination, into how the nineteenth-century dream of a science of verse has shaped contemporary scientific exploration. It does so via the often-overlooked mid-century poet and scientific critic Josephine Miles.