Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

Historians of early twentieth-century British and American literary modernism have often portrayed the public sphere as a space that facilitates mass deception. Indeed, the Freudian psychoanalytic model upon which such arguments depend dominates accounts of modernist responses to advertising, propaganda, and mass media. Such representations overlook the significance of William James as a theorizer of a pluralistic public sphere. Based on an understanding of the self as a distributed aggregate of competing “selves” and private and public allegiances, James and an American modernist cohort saw the public sphere as likewise composed of plural, distributed entities. Confronted by a culture of group-think, crowd contagion, and global fascism, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Walter Lippmann, and Katherine Anne Porter deployed a Jamesian variety of civic modernism based upon an ethics of estrangement, in which the internally conflicted “sick soul” is the means of both psychic and civic regeneration.

Commencing with the allegorical adaptations and politicisations of Arthurian settings that arose in the wake of the 1688 Revolution, this chapter examines several discrete modes of literary Arthurianism across the long eighteenth century. As Britain formed around them, eighteenth-century English-language writers adapted the character of Arthur to new aesthetic tastes and modified the Arthurian story to suit emergent modes of story-telling, reshaping the vales of the Arthurian myth according to their own cultural and political concerns. The chapter explores the ways in which Arthur was increasingly embroiled in contested debates about English nationhood and English/British national identity whilst also tracing the evolution of the Arthurian legends into a wider Arthurian ‘mythos’ in which the overarching culture, settings, structures, symbols and themes of the Arthurian world became as significant as the individual figures and narratives featured within them.

Between 1830 and 1860, new conceptions of moral complicity sparked fierce debates in the United States. Reformers, religious authorities, novelists, market activists, and politicians zealously spelled out how moral liability flowed across legal systems, commercial networks, conspiracies, and political structures. The Introduction begins by illuminating the religious roots of this activist discourse. Then it outlines gendered threads of northern complicity critique, especially the focus on urban sexual vice, and plumbs abolitionism’s preoccupation with thickening social ties and causal webs that connected individuals and institutions to remote and widely distributed evils. Finally, an overview of the book’s chapters introduces key concepts such as moral ensembles, organic sin, tolerance complicity, moral taint, the Black market, and democratic complicity. Throughout, the Introduction highlights how complicity critics adapted old imaginative grammars and developed new ones to capture new forms of moral enmeshment and convey their dynamics and dangers.

The chapter argues that the British gothic is not, as has been assumed, the beginning of the gothic as such, but a response to the local effects of transregional capitalist modernisation. The chapter observes that this history was not only financed by enslavement in the Atlantic world, it was accompanied by a pervasive and fundamentally destructive understanding of racial categories that British gothic writing negotiated. Exploring this entangled material and ideological history, the chapter first analyses late eighteen-century British gothic written at a time when the nation was flush with the spoils of enslavement in the Atlantic world. The chapter then discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conceived in the wake of slave-led revolution and uprisings in the Caribbean, abolition concerns, increased industrialisation and escalating industrial action, forges a racialised body around which notions of whiteness can take shape. In the final section, the chapter explores fin de siècle imperial gothic texts that testify to a New Imperialism by registering the increasingly anxious construction of racial identity that attended transregional capitalism at the time.

This extensive critical introduction examines Kunzru’s work in the context of global identities and literary inheritance. It then provides a detailed breakdown of the individual chapters on each of Kunzru’s novels, his short story collection and his experimental creative non-fiction.

In Chapter 7 poems from two poets are read, against their very different experience on sheep farms: one as an owner-occupier in Devon and the other as a writer in residence on three farms in Dorset. By the time Ted Hughes acquired Moortown Farm in Devon, which he farmed jointly with his father-in-law, he had already developed his ideas about how to treat animals in his poetry. This chapter considers how domesticated animals fit into his literary practice. The case is made for Hughes to be seen as having a primary influence in the animal turn in the humanities, in a way that complements his importance in wider ecological literary criticism. In 2014 poet Kay Syrad and sculptor Chris Drury were ‘embedded’ on three organic farms in Dorset. Kay Syrad has ‘crafted a narrative which witnesses what it is to be a farmer’ through her own poetry and recorded interviews with the farmers. The chapter reads this poetry and prose from the viewpoint of the animal turn. It also explores the very different narratives and values deployed by Hughes during what he saw as a fundamental shift in Devon farming, and those of contemporary organic and naturalistic farming practice.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

This chapter will explore, for the first time, the existence, development and characteristics of a Latin American corpus of contemporary Arthurian literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century), written both in Spanish and Portuguese. So far, the collection and study of texts from the Latin-speaking nations of North, Central and South America (Latin America) has remained unexplored. This chapter will show that this area has suffered from unjust neglect; there is, therefore, an urgency to fill this gap in Arthurian studies. Arthur, Merlin and Isolde are found in the tropical lands of Mexico or the great plains of central Brazil, and their stories were added to local motifs; they add new meanings for different communities of readers. Latin American children and younger readers were equally fond of Arthur – as much as young readers elsewhere.

The polemical prose works that John Donne produced prior to his ordination are often perceived as ‘historical’ texts that have no place in literary studies, or else are discarded by historians as works produced by a ‘literary’ figure that have no place in historical studies. Indeed, although Donne’s position in the literary canon is unquestionable, his polemic has received undeservedly little attention, and his importance for early modern religious studies, especially for post-Reformation Catholicism, has been underappreciated. The aim of the introduction is to establish how Donne’s polemical works can be used to examine an extremely pressing issue in early Stuart England: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the way in which this issue prompted disputes over conformity that fractured the community of which Donne was in some sense a member. It argues that, despite being marginalised in both Donne studies and post-Reformation studies, these works reveal vital information about Donne and the politics and religion of Jacobean England, and are particularly important within the context of martyrdom, divine right monarchy and the rise of royal absolutism.

The settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) occupy dominant positions within the Oceanian region, though this centrality is in part an effect of relationships with surrounding island nations. Reading comparatively across a selection of Oceanian texts, this chapter asks how gothic interludes encode these sometimes-obscured connections, exclusions, and intraregional imperial histories, thus examining gothic as a lexicon in which to map an archipelagic unconscious.

David Hering demonstrates how Kunzru dramatises musical objectification to provide a satirical swipe at the condition of blackness in contemporary America. Following the actions of two young college graduates, Seth and Carter, as they strive to add old blues texture 344s to musical recordings in order to attain a level of cultural authenticity, White Tears emerges as Kunzru’s most atmospheric novel, documenting the insidious cultural contamination of the past on the present. As the chapter argues, their Baudrillardian track, ‘Graveyard Blues’, comes to serve as a liminal object ‘which speaks to a broader social concept of blackness as both object and non-existence, one which Kunzru weaponises by transforming this abject, non-existent, ghostly state into a violent narrative of revenge, revoicing and possession’. Hering’s analysis – via a sustained conversation with Frantz Fanon - examines how Kunzru’s work interrogates the complex interplay of subjecthood and objecthood in relation to the traumatic legacy of racial exploitation, gesturing to the legacies of slavery woven into the fabric of American culture.

The early nineteenth-century literary revival of the Arthurian legends inaugurated a corresponding resurgence in the visual arts. New printings of historic romances and verse by contemporary poets, notably Alfred Tennyson, furnished artists with Arthurian subjects and stimulated popular demand for their work. Arthurian artworks proliferated everywhere from the Palace of Westminster to the walls of the Royal Academy to the pages of illustrated books. Under Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s leadership, the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites gave fresh forms to Arthurian narratives, imbuing them with melancholy and Romantic passion. In the latter half of the century, the trend spread from Great Britain to America and Canada, where artists introduced Arthurian figures into North American landscapes. In Europe, French, German and Belgian artists drew inspiration from Wagner’s Arthurian operas. The revival persisted into the 1920s, when post-war shifts in artistic and cultural values brought the long florescence of Arthurian art to a close.