This chapter retraces the theoretical debates on autobiographical writing in Africa and proposes a pluralistic approach to the continuum of self-referential genres allowing for the writing of the self in postcolonial African contexts. Focusing on Francophone West Africa, firstly, the autobiographical imperative in the colonial French school system where writing on oneself was an imposed educational practice, is pointed out. Secondly, the function of autobiographical writing as a deconstruction of the condescending colonial ethnographical gaze on African cultures from the 1950s onwards is underlined. Using Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s set of memoirs as prominent examples, the chapter further elaborates on both the distress and richness of cultural hybridity in postcolonial life writing before venturing into the specificities of women writers’ contributions. Ken Bugul’s series of not less than five texts marked by their volatile autobiographical pact, oscillating between a referential and an autofictional mode, is analyzed in more detail. The chapter shows that African autobiographical writing in French has not produced a fixed genre that would imitate the colonizer’s canon, but rather that it is inventive in mixing and innovating established genres such as memoir, autoethnography, travelogue, childhood narrative, and autofiction.

Sheep have been associated with humans for over 10,000 years, but are poorly represented in poetry and criticism. The animal turn has the potential to rectify this marginalisation of a species that has played an important part in the formation of both the landscape and the agro-pastoral culture. Concepts such as natureculture allow for the exchange across the species boundary to be acknowledged. New readings of poems about sheep can provoke new ways of interrogating the natural world. Sheep, in common with other ruminants, emit methane which, as a powerful greenhouse gas, is an important contributor to global heating. The animal turn recognises the sentience and agency of other species, but also brings with it a need to reconsider whether it is right to eat meat. There is no escaping the complexity of the moral implications which require a choice between the welfare of the individual animal or the extinction of the whole species. This book claims a place for sheep in the literary discussion of the animal turn and shows how this turn can complicate ecocritical discussion of the pastoral.

Chapter 4 examines how contemporary poetry plays with the world and necessarily puts its own relation to the world at risk, thereby making visible the fragility and creative potential of the world. I analyse wordplay, translational strategies and ‘drifting’ trajectories in poems by Hong Kongese Sinophone poet Xi Xi, contemporary French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Japanese-Francophone poet Ryōko Sekiguchi, Taiwanese Sinophone poet Hsia Yü and multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall. What makes these poets comparable, I argue, is their shared concerns about the poet’s relation to the world, about translational and translingual poetics, migratory and dispersive trajectories of language, identity and life. I examine how these poets employ ludic poetic language to incorporate and transform risk. A poetics of risk emerges from poetry’s performance of the precarious conditions of contemporary life and ultimately of poetry itself.

The first chapter introduces the key texts associated with the animal turn in the environmental humanities with particular emphasis on Peter Singer (1975), John Berger (1980) and Donna Haraway (2008). The 10,000-year history of domestication is explored through Juliet Clutton-Brock (1995, 2012) and Terry O’Connor (2013). The animal turn in the humanities depends in part on insights gained from the development of ethology from Darwin through the work of the 1973 Nobel laureates Tinbergen and Lorenz, the sociobiology of Wilson and its more recent transition to evolutionary psychology (Griffiths 2011: 393–414). Ted Hughes’s essays on writing about animals are used to test the idea that the animal turn can enrich our critical understanding of poems about animals.

Lancelot is the sole Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes not to have been directly adapted in German. However, the integration of elements of Lancelot material bears witness to an indirect reaction on the part of German Arthurian romance to the provocative and virulent narrative tradition surrounding the Knight of the Cart. From reminiscences of the abduction of the queen in the early narratives, this chapter turns to the radical reinvention of Lancelot as a serial monogamist who works to uphold social order and consolidate Arthurian rule in Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet. It further discusses the remodelling of the fairy upbringing motif in Lanzelet and the anonymous Wigamur. Finally, the remarkable treatment of Guinevere’s abduction in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône is considered in connection with the problematic relationship of the German Arthurian tradition with the otherworld.

Arthurian tourist sites create what Stijn Reijnders, adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux mémoire, calls lieux d’imagination: places that may or may not have their origins in history, but are compelling precisely because they join the real with a desired imaginary. We offer a tour of Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Abbey in the UK, surveying the development of these sites from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) through the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival to today’s New Age religions and media tourism. We argue that Arthurian places are continually co-produced in processes far from finished; moreover, diverse groups have their own investments in such places – and are sometimes in conflict with each other. Thus we conclude with a discussion of two Arthurian sites outside the UK that exemplify how Arthuricity flourishes in unlikely places: the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, and Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s homage to the knights of the Round Table.

Between 1858 and 1862, the African Civilization Society, led by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany, sought to reorient the Atlantic cotton economy and undermine American slavery by planting a Black emigrant cotton-producing colony in the Niger Delta. They insisted that trade with cotton-hungry Great Britain would release Britain from its shameful complicity as the globe’s dominant consumer of slave cotton and help Britain pay down its debt to Africa and people of African descent. To these Afro-pragmatists, this new Black market, harnessing the very market mechanisms that constrained Black life under US slavery, would fund the development of a commercially sovereign Black nation, launching Black commercial modernity and, with it, Black cultural ascendence and geopolitical respect. This chapter traces the interwoven economic, moral, religious, racial, and imperial matrices of this Black market. While this book’s other chapters focus on complicity as a moral problem, this chapter examines complicity as a racial, political economic, and rhetorical resource.

This final chapter addresses the loaded question of gothic naming, considering how and why it remains valuable to understand fiction with diverse regional and cultural roots within a (world-)gothic horizon. First we will briefly rehearse the argument that underpins one of this volume’s claim: namely, that to extricate gothic studies from the taxonomic bind in which it is placed concerning fiction from beyond the so-called West, the origin story of the gothic needs to be reconceived. Second we build on and draw together world-cultural and postcolonial theorisations of catachresis to conceptualise the categorisation and linking of discrete world-cultural forms as world-gothic. For ‘the gothic’ to remain useful as a way of designating fiction, we suggest that the term should be understood as just one possible name, which catachrestically – imperfectly and partially – describes heterogeneous and always situated cultural, folk and spiritual responses to the socio-ecological changes wrought in uneven ways by the capitalist world-system.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

This chapter introduces Arthurian translations and adaptations originating in medieval Scandinavia, from the earliest translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a late ballad version of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It considers the translations of Marie de France’s Arthurian and Tristan-related works and the three romances of Chrétien de Troyes that made their way into Old Norwegian. The chapter demonstrates how this material had impact on the pre-existing Old Norse literary system, introducing new emotional expression into the saga repertoire, and providing popular motifs that were adopted in later indigenous romances.

In the run-up to the publication of J.M. Coetzee’s first book, Dusklands (1974), Ravan Press’s publisher, Peter Randall, asked the new author for a photograph of himself for the book’s jacket cover. Coetzee was initially reluctant to provide a picture and also reticent to supply biographical information about his schooling, family background and personal interests, because, as he put it, such information ‘suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in’.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.