How did nascent eighteenth-century entomological practices render insects visible as objects of scientific study? Beginning with the “Dead Zoo” (the Natural History Museum), the chapter queries visibility in science. It surveys methods for the collection, preservation, and display of insects. In the letters of Dru Drury we see how insects taken from across the globe accrue even more visibility as valuable commodities. The correspondence of Henry Smeathman and Drury further suggests how insects, as cargo on slave ships, became the signifiers of colonial conquest and dispossession – what Arjun Appadurai calls “the still life of Empire.” A meditation follows on what it means to have taken insects out of space and time without heeding the ecosystems in which they thrive. David Abram’s philosophic thoughts on shared respiration among all living things help us to see what possibilities of sensual engagement with the natural world are foreclosed in the Dead Zoo.

Chapter 7 argues that multinational corporations are the most important vehicle of global trade and international investment in today’s globalized economy, which they help shape, and that they are a central actor in the development of international investment law. The chapter describes the corporate stakeholder and its characteristics, interests, and role in the international investment law regime in Latin America. It begins by discussing the characteristics of the corporate stakeholder as a participant in the regime and the emergence of new corporate stakeholders. It argues that the corporate stakeholder and its interests are much more nuanced and diverse than the traditional conception of hostility between multinational corporations and the other systemic actors would suggest. The chapter adopts the perspective of the multinational enterprises towards international investment law and discusses whether, and if so, to what extent, corporations care about investment treaties and the availability of investor–state dispute resolution when making decisions on foreign direct investment. The author submits that corporations care generally about the protection of property rights and investment safety, which are objectives that can be secured by several means, not limited to bilateral investment treaties and investor–state dispute settlement. In the final section, the chapter discusses some of the ways in which corporations have accommodated the narratives promoted by other systemic actors and how these developments may contribute to norm creation in international investment law.

The introduction introduces and defines broadsheet ballads and how they were sold. It explains which digital sites have made this book possible, and how Thomas Percy and John Payne Collier both nearly destroyed the field of theatre ballads.

This chapter addresses Arthurian romance and its transition from manuscript to print in the Renaissance, in its four European heartlands, France, Germany, Iberia and Italy. The first printed editions appear in the last decades of the sixteenth century, and seem to have met with success, with printer-publishers capitalising on the popularity of Arthuriana in manuscript: extending or condensing, resurrecting more obscure romances and adapting them to new tastes, modernising language – but also furnishing, in the face of moralists’ disapproval, alluring prefaces which stress their educational and moral value, and their importance as records of ancestry and hence for the revival of ancestral chivalry. Increasingly, however, publishers look to novelty, turning to new heroes like Amadis de Gaule, or Perceforest, or new adventures for familiar heroes, witness Maugin’s Nouveau Tristan. Ultimately, however, Arthurian romances come to seem trivial, or morally suspect, or simply outdated – and they are largely discarded by printers.

In 1973 Coetzee gave an early manuscript version of what would later become ‘The Vietnam Project’ to his friend Daniel Hutchinson. In a covering note he drew attention to the parallels between the two stories of Dusklands that were, on the face of it, worlds apart: ‘You will notice that these two stories are thematically and formally identical. I am puzzled by this phenomenon and would be most interested to have it explained to me.’1 ‘The Vietnam Project’ was set in contemporary America, and in the story’s centre is Eugene Dawn’s marital and mental breakdown against the background of his classified Vietnam War research; ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ is a semi-fictionalised account of a late-eighteenth-century Cape frontiersman who embarks on an expedition to Namaqualand. In a subsequent interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee thought that the two narratives shared ideas, ‘but otherwise the relation is loose’.

George Lippard popularized a new form of novel whose thickly interlaced plotlines and generic layering conveyed social and moral dimensions of urban experience inaccessible to more conventional literary and journalistic modes of depicting cities. Dwelling on various forms of nefarious association tethering and tainting Philadelphia’s citizens, Lippard’s sensational novel, The Quaker City (1845), focuses on two social “shapes” urban participatory sin can take, structural complicity and network complicity. It devotes major plotlines, each featuring a distinct narrative form, to the investigation of each. Each kind of complicity imposes crucial aesthetic constraints on its own narrativization, and these constraints are overcome, the novel suggests, only when these two narrative forms are subsumed within a totalizing vision of Christian eschatology, or apocalypse.

The context for Chapter 4 is the award in July 2017 to the English Lake District, Cumbria of UNESCO World Heritage Status as a cultural landscape. The basis of this award is both for the role played by traditional farming and the way that our ideas about landscape have been influenced by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin. Herdwick sheep, which have a long history in the Lake District, were championed by Beatrix Potter on her portfolio of hill farms that she bequeathed to the National Trust. James Rebanks, who is both a Wordsworth scholar and Herdwick shepherd, continues this tradition. Cumbria, which includes the Lake District, is home to three distinctive hill breeds: Herdwick, Swaledale and Rough Fell. The idea of a cultural landscape is proving to be contentious, and this chapter offers the opportunity to explore how the pastoral mode can be reinterpreted through the animal turn. There is a further opportunity to consider how creative writing is being deployed to conserve the place for hill farming in rural culture. Poets have played an important role in reflecting the lived experience of shepherds. Contemporary poets discussed include Meg Peacocke, Josephine Dickinson and Harriet Fraser.

This chapter examines the contemporary upsurge of African speculative fiction. After the global financial crisis that started in 2007, the production, circulation, and consumption of African speculative fiction (ASF) increased significantly. Starting as a relatively unknown and independent phenomenon, authors, publics, and publishers globally embraced ASF in the long decade that followed the Global financial crisis (2007–2020). Now, ASF authors and fans have both constructed a cultural infrastructure in which the genre can flourish, most notably in the form of the online ASF magazine Omenana and the African Speculative Fiction Society. Moreover, ASF works compete for major awards and involve publishers from the core of the world-system: for example, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Disney started producing Iwájú (Nelson 2021). This chapter provides insight into this ASF phenomenon. It discusses why the upsurge took place, how the history of the genre before the upsurge has been understood, and what the role is of terms like “African,” “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” “Afrofuturism,” and “Africanfuturism” for understanding the genre. Finally, it provides an outlook on ASF’s possible future.

The shairi is the genre of Swahili poetry characterized by an incredible versatility. For more than 200 years, it has traveled across media, from dance poetry to manuscripts in Arabic script, radio programs, WhatsApp groups, and school curricula; it has spilled over into hip-hop lyrics. It encompasses poems that have often been treated as belonging to mutually exclusive categories, like “traditional,” “modern,” and “popular,” and associated with different temporalities, spaces, and actors. Thus, as the chapter shows, the shairi lends itself to think about genre as a flexible frame. It zeros in on its capacity to be constituted in dynamic relations, defined by but also defining changing social worlds. By drawing on “historical poetics,” the chapter shows the multiple intersecting ancestries of the genre, sometimes forgotten sometimes rearticulated, that account for the genre’s flexibility. The genre’s critical potential lies particularly in challenging persisting notions of a teleological literary history.

This chapter examines the various, and often conflicting, views towards the relationship between resistance and martyrdom in early modern England, from those who believed that Catholics were to show total resistance to the Protestant State, to those who believed that one could be both devoutly Catholic and loyal to the State. It goes on to situate Donne within this debate and argues that he, like the appellants, sought to collapse the opposition between Catholics and Protestants by creating an alternative dichotomy between conformity and nonconformity. By examining his representation of the Society of Jesus in particular, this argument challenges the view that Donne’s condemnation of the Jesuits was a reaction to the suffering that he witnessed within his own family. Instead, this chapter seeks to place Donne’s anti-Jesuitism within a literary and historical tradition that sought to overturn the common precept that acts of resistance against the State could lead to martyrdom.

This chapter explores world-gothic forms and figurations relating to the enclosure, extraction, and global distribution of oil in contemporary literary fiction from Denmark and Nigeria. Touching on key issues of visibility, vulnerability, and world-systemic interrelation, the chapter argues that gothic as a form of irrealism excels in revealing the bewildering experience of a lifeworld remade around fossil fuels. As fossil extraction is undeniably experienced in hugely unequal ways across the world-system, this chapter highlights the need for cross-hemispheric readings of contemporary petrofiction to identify and relate these differences in a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor – ‘Spider the Artist’ – along with two recent texts from Denmark that touch on offshore oil, namely Jesper Brygger’s collection of poems Transporterne (2017; The Transporters) and Gitte Broeng and Lasse Krog Møller’s very short monologue Mare (2023).