This chapter reconsiders the grotesque in the light of European sensibilities of transgression and abnormality. Querying to what extent the grotesque can challenge and unsettle modern and supposedly rational (European) sensibilities through its insistence on the overflow and unruliness of the body, the chapter starts out by a reading of the film Midsommar (2019). The chapter then proceeds to unearth the grotesque as an aesthetic term from its medieval and classical roots in order to perceive it in the light of a modernity that has attempted to regulate and eradicate premodern worldviews. From here, it examines the grotesque through a theoretical genealogy of Wolfgang Kayser, John Ruskin, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. It then engages in a reading of texts in light of both their national, regional and planetary contexts, such as Canadian David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1983, Dutch Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), and Argentinian Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2017). The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a global, environmental or planetary grotesque.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of comparative analysis of the choice, placing and treatment of illustrations in the text. Here I list the eight surviving sets of the Lancelot-Grail made in the same cultural contexts. I analyse a pair of copies of the Estoire del saint Graal attributable to Metz in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century, comparing them with MS Royal 14 E.III, the most fully illustrated surviving copy. Both Metz manuscripts show special interest in the end of the story and the tomb of King Lancelot, ancestor of Lancelot du Lac, and one of them shows particular interest in depictions of the Grail.  Perhaps it was commissioned by a member of the clergy or by a devout lay person. In this period we have few names of patrons or makers and conclusions must be based on what is in each manuscript and the pictorial choices made there.

This chapter broadens the book’s focus by examining recent American fictions of African migration by Dinaw Mengestu and Teju Cole, and extends the study’s intellectual scope by connecting male friendship to cognate discourses of cosmopolitanism and globalisation. The chapter begins by taking up the themes of race relations, gentrification, and local community explored in Chapter 3, analysing Mengestu’s spare 2007 narrative The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. The chapter demonstrates how Mengestu’s fiction eschews the conventions of the so-called literary migrant novel, revising the genre’s tropes of cultural loss and historical trauma, while recasting familiar motifs of social mobility and cross-cultural exchange. Turning to Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), the chapter draws on the work of Hannah Arendt to chart Cole’s vexed portrayal of cosmopolitanism, in which attempts at association and solidarity, whether forged locally or globally, seem always to falter when faced with the problem of cultural difference. For both Mengestu and Cole, the friendships at the centre of their narratives become a key site for exploring the problems of identity and belonging confronting their immigrant narrators, and thus offer a crucial reworking of the politics of male friendship explored in earlier chapters.

The first reliable accounts concerning King Arthur reached the Iberian peninsula in the twelfth century, but they did not become popular until the fourteenth century. From then on, the success of the texts was reflected in translations, retellings and imitations. The political particularities of the peninsula changed over time as the cultural references shifted from Al-Andalus to Castile: while in the early stages a classical tradition survived along with some Oriental influences from the Arabs, in the thirteenth century there was an increase in the French influence, which lasted into the fourteenth century and then gave way to the influence coming from Italy thanks to the expansion of the kingdom of Aragon in the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula (1508) revived the model.

This chapter provides an overview of the proliferation of Arthurian texts produced in North America, from an 1807 pamphlet to the poetry, drama, children’s literature and prose fiction of the turn of the century. It situates the legend’s development in Canada and the United States in relation to the Arthurian revival in England, specifically Tennyson’s poetry. In doing so, it identifies some of the common stories adapted (the Grail quest, the love triangles) and the different approaches of Canadian and American authors, whether claiming continuity with, or separation from, the English tradition. The chapter ends with analysis of the American Arthurian novel with the most lasting influence: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

The literary tradition where Arthur first appeared belongs to Welsh language, the immediate descendent of the Brittonic Celtic language spoken across most of the island of Britain before the subsequent arrivals of the Romans, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes,1 and the Normans. At the turn of the sixth century, which marks the moment associated with the Arthur of history, the landscape and cultural outlook of Wales and northern Britain offered an anchor to what were probably oral stories in circulation. The earliest surviving Welsh Arthurian poems and narratives furnished the essence and the pathways for the later transmission and adaptation of the legends into other languages and territories throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.2 The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture (henceforth CHALC) acknowledges the longue durée of Arthuriana, from the origins of the Arthurian story to an exploration of its impressive reach across medieval Europe, then into the global world.