This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

This chapter focuses on “visible” insects with the rise of entomological illustration. Although Maria Sibylla Merian lived outside the parameters of the Enlightenment, she inaugurates the genre of modern entomological illustration, grounding it in the Dutch still-life tradition. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty allows for reflection on Merian’s status as a visible and mobile “body among things,” a corporeal existence caught up in the “fabric” of the world: she lived with her caterpillars and thereby arrested their “inner animation.” Her illustrations capture an ineffable effect – the imprint of her non-human insect kin upon her embodied subjectivity. The chapter then turns to Merian’s legacy and her impact on the British illustrators who follow her: Eleazar Albin, Moses Harris, and Edward Donovan. Donovan’s occlusion of parasitic behavior in one especially aesthetically pleasing insect, the Chrysis ignita, leads to an argument for the necessity of accepting a wider planetary rationale, even when it opposes human assumption.

The area covered by Romance languages, literatures and cultures between 1550 and 1800 is characterised by a decline in the Arthurian tradition and by exchanges which led to the dissolution of the Arthurian romance into the chivalric narrative. The vogue for Carolingian matter may well have led, episodically, to the preservation of Arthurian memories, but overall, it accelerated the decline of the Round Table romances, particularly in Italy. The Iberian and Italian areas promoted heroes such as Amadis and Roland, who were destined for European success, whilst France recovers the Beau Tenebreux, thanks to Herberay des Essarts. During that period, the erosion of the Matter of Britain was more marked in the Roman area than in Britain, where Arthur remained something of a national symbol. Including these derivative heroes (Amadis, Roland/Orlando) allows us to bring to light the specificities of the areas under consideration.

William Wordsworth’s “To a Butterfly” problematically frames a world where the poet does not exist in the same space as the insect. But how does the natural world look back at the human? How do we look to the living planet? Three poets answer this question. First, John Aikin announces a turn towards nature and the natural world in poetry. Barbauld’s “To Mrs. P--, with some Drawings of Birds and Insects” demonstrates the turn put into practice. Selections from James Thomson’s The Seasons elucidate the poet’s close proximity to living, breathing insects who prove sentient and purposeful, as Thomson uses personification to oppose anthropectomy. Insect life in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature reveals his materialist thinking and his recognition that insects are a crucial part of organic process. In his discussion of parasitism in particular we find a pre-modern acceptance of the notion of symbiotic life. In contrast, in “The Caterpillar” by Anna Laetitia Barbauld the parasitic behavior of the European tent caterpillar, or Lackey moth, shows how human ethics can be stretched to their limit when planetary life is observed “looking back.”

The District of Columbia, a federal district overseen by Congress, was a constitutional battleground where freedom nationalists, proslavery firebrands, and supporters of sectional harmony clashed over federal responsibility for slavery. From 1838 to 1859, US Representative Joshua Giddings (Ohio) insisted that the federal government had no constitutional authority to uphold slavery there. His signature claim was that the framers had granted northern states the right not to be made complicit in slavery through any action or policy of the federal government, beyond the Constitution’s requirements. Giddings railed against the persistent battering of this political and moral quarantine. The sensational attempt by over seventy-five enslaved Black residents to flee the nation’s capital in 1848 onboard the Pearl brought unprecedented attention to Giddings’ defense of northern purity rights. This chapter examines Giddings’ notion of a northern right to political innocence and its role in his congressional brawls over slavery in the District of Columbia.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

‘Non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema’ is a diffuse collection of films held together only by the fact that they are not in English and they all bear some kind of nominal or narrative relationship to the tradition of Arthurian story-telling. Despite scant evidence of continuous tradition, including between films in the same language, and long gaps in the corpus, three main strands can be identified: cinematic versions of the Tristan and Iseult legend, films about Perceval and the Holy Grail, and films centred on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The third strand is minor: one of the most notable aspects of non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema is the relative paucity of films about Arthur himself, suggesting a distinct relationship to the Arthurian tradition. This corpus of Arthurian screen texts differs from Anglophone cinema in its narrative emphasis, avant-garde techniques, and in its engagement with cultural, historical and ideological concerns that extend well beyond the Anglosphere.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

This chapter traces the growth of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King from his earliest ideas for an Arthurian epic in his notebooks from the 1830s to the completion of his twelve-book epic in 1886. It examines his treatment of his Arthurian sources, most importantly Malory, and attempts to capture the reactions of nineteenth-century readers to the Idylls by drawing on a range of contemporary reviews. It is difficult to overestimate Tennyson’s role in recentring the Arthurian legend in popular consciousness, and the final section briefly explores the influence of the Idylls on aspects of Victorian popular culture.

Arthurian topics feature in medieval mural painting and sculpture in architecture from the early twelfth century onwards. The ‘spatial’ aspects of these art forms were ideal for medieval patrons to represent and promote themselves to others. They competed through monumental art – be it in their own residence, a town hall, or a church – to show their identity and status. This chapter traces the main trends, iconographical topics, and influences, with consideration of the social and political function of the representation of Arthur and his knights in medieval monumental art.

In Chapter 6 poetry from Scotland is considered in the context of the movement of sheep from the border regions into the Highlands at the time of the Clearances. Although it happened long ago, this traumatic event still colours narratives of sheep in contemporary Scotland. The Northumberland and Scottish Borders and the Cheviot Hills played an important role in the development of sheep breeds. It was here that the Blackface and Cheviot sheep were developed to meet the requirements of the terrain and from where the breeds spread north during the improvements inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment. The arrival of these breeds in Scotland, driven by market forces as well as ideas about improvement, was sudden and violent. In the play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, first performed in 1973, the new breeds of sheep are seen as signifiers of aggressive colonialism that displaced the subsistence-farming crofters so that their lands could be converted to sheep walk. Poets considered in this chapter are Jim Carruth, who writes from first-hand experience as a farmer poet, and Hugh McMillan, whose sympathetic engagement with sheep is both humorous and insightful.

Chapter 5 covers the Welsh mountains from Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons. The agro-pastoral society of this region is central to the concept of Welsh identity and language. The poets discussed in this chapter write in English, but this dual heritage is always present. The Welsh poet Harri Webb chose the title The Green Desert for his 1969 collection of poems. The idea that the Cambrian Mountains are seen as some sort of desert has been cited by environmentalists as an example of the damage done to the landscape by sheep. This chapter argues for a more nuanced reading of Webb’s designation, linked as it is to the concept of ‘terra incognita’. It is argued that a postcolonial reading would be more appropriate. It will take note of readings of Webb’s poetry by Morris (1993), Jarvis (2008) and Bohata (2004), but with particular reference to how sheep farming is now under pressure. Welsh Mountain sheep and closely related mountain breeds are the mainstay of the Welsh-speaking hill farmers in Snowdonia and the northern Cambrian Mountains. Authors include Ffion Jones (2014) and poets Owen Sheers (2000), Christopher Meredith (2011), Gillian Clarke (1997) and Christine Evans (2006).

Kristian Shaw’s chapter reveals how Kunzru’s most recent novel marks a close engagement with recent political developments, such as the spread of Western populism, resistance to the Syrian refugee crisis, and the election of Donald Trump. Drawing on a personal interview, Shaw argues Red Pill not only reflects Kunzru’s own anxieties about the 2016 US presidential election but also continues the concern for the haunting legacy of race in the contemporary moment that began with The Impressionist. For Kunzru, the novel reveals the ‘harsh contrast’ between those who believe the ‘rational progress of humankind will be done by academic progress’ and the xenophobic, nihilistic rhetoric of the alt-right, ‘where everything is done with a hyper-ironic mockery and nothing actually means anything’. The unnamed narrator’s obsession with the mysterious Anton, a baleful personification of the alt-right, leads him to question the values of a Habermasian public sphere and the morality of what Shaw terms his ‘gestural cosmopolitanism’. As he argues, the alt-right’s vision of a distorted ‘American sublime’, predicated on a nativist myth of ethnic unity, aligns with Trump’s attempts to tap into a destructive nostalgia untainted by the politics of progress. The second half of the chapter articulates the ways in which the alt-right manipulated memetic discourses to conceal their white supremacist agenda. Kunzru’s novel thus connects the spectral echoes of totalitarianism to contemporary cultural debates to expose the historical legacies that continue to scar the body politic.

Chapter 12 gives an account of the impact of international investments on the human right to water, which has been internationally recognized as an independent and positive human right since 2010, with the adoption of Resolution 64/292 of the United Nations General Assembly. However, the realization of this right has not been free of tension and contradictions, because factors such as the fragmentation of the international system, the different levels of development especially in the post-Cold War context, the rise of neoliberalism and the opening of markets, have led to a legal framework for international public development that favors the transnational private capital, and to a dispute resolution system that favors multinational corporations through international arbitration by institutions such as ICSID. The case of drinking water and sanitation, particularly in respect to Argentina, which the chapter discusses, illustrates the tensions and contradictions in the realization of the right. While UNGA Resolution 64/292 recognizes that access to drinking water in sufficient quantity and quality is a basic and universal human right, the international investment law regime jeopardizes the effectiveness of such recognition.