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.

Chapter 10 argues that the relationship between investment and human rights represents a troublesome matter to the states, especially at international level, as governments must balance their compliance with international obligations under human rights instruments, with the protection of investors guaranteed by international investment agreements. Human rights and investment law are usually presented as opposing fields with colliding interests as well as contradictory rules and regulations. International investment agreements are usually characterized as a tool that favors businesses, which in turn, allow the special interests of foreign investor to triumph over any other public policy concern of host states. Some of the alleged threats posed by international investment agreements to human rights range from concerns regarding a “regulatory chill” effect when pursuing human right related policies, to the lack of transparency and legitimacy of the investor–state dispute settlement. Focusing on Latin America, the chapter argues that a human rights dimension can be recognized in international investment law. Furthermore, the authors claim that the evolution of international investment agreements is not necessarily in opposition with human rights protection, and that there are more connecting points rather than conflicting ones. The chapter shows that international investment agreements had introduced several protections already included in human rights instruments and have provided them with a mechanism that allows its enforceability.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

This essay explores the relevance of William James’s thought for addressing the contemporary climate crisis, thereby putting his thinking to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented shattering of certainties, indeed of worlds? In the first part of the essay, James’s writings are revisited and the echoes of the Anthropocene are traced in view of the continuities and ruptures between his time and ours. This seems important because, if, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, the imprint of human action on the earth is so profound as to challenge the very sense of historical continuity, then we must question the continuing validity of our intellectual past in order to think through our present. In the second part, the essay reinterprets James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical responses to worlds in upheaval, countering simplistic readings of James as a “happy pragmatist” who simply goes for what works. It is precisely because James thought in the face of a troubled present – and not simply about it – that his philosophy can be made to matter into today’s world in turmoil.