Chapter 2 takes as its primary focus an early example of the sentimental novel Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Noting that Pamela’s weeping is subject to similar suspicions as her virtue, it draws on the work of more sexually explicit authors – such as Eliza Haywood and John Cleland – to posit that this distrust of the heroine’s tears can be traced to their association with female body fluids that are more difficult to write about. In the process, it takes up the question of gender as it pertains to crying, arguing that female characters like Pamela have routinely been made to shoulder all the negative connotations of tears, but are far less frequently allowed to share in their redeeming ones. This chapter seeks to examine and redress this double standard.

This chapter explores the rise of the graphic narrative in Africa – starting with cartoons and comic strips and culminating in contemporary graphic novels and popular comics series. It outlines three key historical developments in the genre. It further argues that comic strips were vehicles for the colonial enterprise: they occurred in colonial journals and magazines in the 1930s/1940s and reflected colonial ideology through mimicry and racial stereotype. Second, cartoons and comics became important tools in anticolonial movements, such as in Nigeria in the 1950s/1960s and apartheid-era South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. Cartoons turned satire and mockery back on the colonizer, while comics were used to subvert the visual language of colonial oppression and to encourage resistance. Finally, didactic comics and graphic narratives (pamphlets, posters, and free-standing albums) have formed part of government policy and development work from the 1990s to the present day. This history has informed present day production. Contemporary graphic narratives combine rich local visual traditions with global trends to negotiate identity, politics, and social change. The chapter ends by examining four examples of more “serious” graphic novels, histories, and memoirs that are indicative, rather than representative, of the diversity of contemporary production.

Lamb’s essays and letters describe various instances in which sharing a book with someone results in feelings of embarrassment or exposure. He describes reading in the public setting of a reading room, the professional context of the period’s review culture, as well as the more intimate, semi-private, and domestic settings in which he reads alongside friends or his sister Mary. Where public and professional contexts promote an element of performance which helps to shield from exposure, Lamb suggests, it is those more intimate forms of shared reading which in fact prove far more personally revealing. As Lamb recounts these moments in a parodic, part-defensive and part-confessional manner, he reflects on what such social phenomena as embarrassment and blushing have to say about sharing more generally.

This chapter is on ‘about-play ballads’ that might be sources, performance reflections or playbook reflections of plays. The first section is about the play-ballads of Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta. The second section is about ballads for other notable plays: William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker, The Puritan Widow, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Faversham; Mucedorus. The third section considers plays that relate to more than one ballad: Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, John Ford and John Webster’s lost The Late Murder in White Chapel or Keep the Widow Waking, and an anonymous play, perhaps by Thomas Heywood, King Edward the Fourth. The chapter shows that while some plays had ballads that told only a corner of their story, others had several linked ballads telling or retelling multiple bits of the narrative. Many more extant ballads are play ones than has been recognised before, and they all modify plays in extraordinary ways.

This introduction establishes an alternative aetiology of the gothic, which we will define as world-gothic across this introduction. World-gothic affirms the transregional scope of gothic production, but it does not understand this as primarily constituting a global distribution and adaptation of conventions and aesthetics. Instead of tracking the outward spread of gothic forms from their birthplace in Europe, world-gothic places a question mark over this widely accepted origin story, asking us to think critically about the world-historical picture it assumes. To do this, we situate the late-eighteenth-century literary form that has come over time to be identified as ‘gothic fiction, in the context of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the capitalist world-system, a concept influentially reformulated by the environmental historian Jason W. Moore as the capitalist world-ecology, and which provides the basis for an approach to transregional cultural production named world-literature – or, more extensively, world-culture.

For over four decades, the District of Columbia, the seat of national government and a major slave-trading depot, stood as a key symbol and site of the US government’s support of slavery. This chapter focuses on abolitionist depictions of the slave trade in the District and the moral liability thrust on northern citizens because of its many kinds of publicness. Abolitionists repeatedly circulated the image of chained slaves driven past the US Capitol. Reprised by sightseers and abolitionists, the iconic image conjured not only democratic complicity but also democratic shame. William Wells Brown searingly critiqued the District slave trade in Original Panoramic Views of the Life of an American Slave (1849), the focus of the chapter’s final section.

The Western conception of haunting in literature typically evokes images of ghosts and other spirits entering our physical plane as a sign of some spiritual or emotional disruption. However, in a marked difference, African, African American and Caribbean cultures and spiritual traditions conceive of hauntings, both ancestral and otherwise, as part of their historical and contemporary epistemology. This essay considers hauntings in the works of African, African American, and Caribbean literature as serving as a bulwark against modernity with its attendant racism, capital exploitation and environmental devastation for colonised people and their descendants in the modern world. Examining short stories by Chinua Achebe, Henry Dumas, and Shani Mootoo demonstrates the multiple ways that African-based spiritual traditions decenter traditional western notions of haunting while simultaneously demonstrating the potential corrective possibilities of these traditions in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly pernicious world for colonised peoples.

Coetzee’s assimilation of photography in prose – through references to images, by way of ocular metaphors, or through an attentiveness to framing, point of view and lighting – owes a debt to a very early and enduring fascination with the camera. He grew up in a family in which photography was ubiquitous, with his mother, the family photographer, making a visual record of domestic life. The family photograph albums, now preserved in the Texas archive, are testimony to the way the family recorded their life across generations. In one of these albums, titled in Coetzee’s own handwriting ‘Photos Ancient and Modern’, there are pages full of photographs of the young Coetzee growing up. But the experience of the child being the object of the camera gaze was also inverted in at least one fascinating moment: it is a remarkable, imperfectly framed image of the mother, captioned ‘Snap of Mother, taken by John. 16th July 1942’. Already at the age of two years, if we take the caption at face value, we must assume that the young Coetzee was a photographer. In taking the Brownie camera – with which he was incessantly being snapped by his mother – into his own hands, the child reversed the roles and turned the lens back at the photographer.

The Conclusion reflects back on the many weeping eyes considered in the course of the book, as well as the insights they provide concerning the tear’s complicated relationship with perception and knowledge, with affect and signification, with gender and power, and with science and sentimentality. It also examines an advertisement for spectacles that illustrates some of the ocular challenges the Victorian periodical press posed to reading eyes. This analysis brings the study back around to affective hermeneutics and to a discussion of the tear as critical lens, a figuration that encapsulates both the theme and method of the project.

This chapter explores Chrétien’s foundational role in the creation and dissemination of Arthurian literature. It begins with a description of the sociohistorical context in which he wrote and a review of the diverse sources on which he drew. He chose as the protagonists of his romances five of Arthur’s knights and created a gallery of attractive and enterprising women to complement their adventures. An examination of the emotions of these female characters, which are tempered by political concerns, informs this essay. The main focus is on Chrétien’s originality – the skill and sophistication of his poetic art, including a masterly use of intertextuality and interlacing. Chrétien delighted in keeping his audience at a distance, inviting critical reflection. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the myriad translations and adaptations his romances inspired in Francophone and other language areas, extending his influence across a wide geographical area and across the ages.