Lucienne Loh’s chapter re-evaluates Kunzru’s 2005 satirical globalisation novel to indicate how its dissection of digital interconnection gestures towards the insidious confluence of biological and technological forces in the twenty-first century. Forging clear parallels between Arjun Mehta’s Leela virus and the recent pandemic, with economic damage becoming the primary concern over issues of national safety, Loh suggests the Western world’s attempts to overcome the respective viruses amounts to a ‘relentless and committed drive to secure their hegemonic ideological grip on the world’. With this in mind, the efforts of Thatcherite Guy Swift and his branding agency to market Britain as a global leader alludes to recent attempts to draw heavily on national heritage as a belated attempt to retain international influence. In the concluding part of her chapter, Loh argues that the novel attains an added prescience, satirising a specific strain of British populism – predicated on imperial dreaming and racist ideologies – which would emerge a decade later and slowly transform into a ‘COVID nationalism’ that doubles down on the desire to turn towards the bordered world.

The chapter suggests that Ben Jonson, lover of the permanence of print, may have authored in-play ballads that he then had published as broadsides. The first part one is on his potential publication of a broadsheet, Caveat for Cutpurses, from his play Bartholomew Fair, the seond part is on a ballad from the masque For the Honour of Wales, the third part is on several ballads for the masque Gypsies Metamorphosed, and part four is on a ballad for the Masque of Augurs. Through ballads, it suggests, Jonson was able to give masques that were themselves not performed more than a handful of times, an alternative and much longer life in paper and song form.

This chapter addresses the complex theme of the penetration of the Arthurian subject in Italy through the circulation of manuscripts; the various forms that characterised this specific reception, ranging from narrative works adhering to French models to more autonomous reworkings, such as compilations (Rustichello da Pisa) and the cantari in octaves, truly anticipated the great epic poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. For a long time these texts, especially the vernacular versions, have been known among scholars by virtue of their linguistic relevance as the earliest witnesses in Italian literary prose, but it should not be forgotten that they saw the light thanks to the intensive Italian production and transcription of manuscripts in their original language. This phenomenon characterised most of the manuscript tradition of Arthurian romances in Italy (Tristan en prose, Guiron le Courtois cycle), and imposes today the use of refined and complex codicological, historical and palaeographical analyses.

American “free-produce” advocates insisted that purchasers of goods made from slave cotton shared fully in the enslaver’s criminality. In fact, they emphasized that this crime-tainted cotton, moving from field to fabric, damned every commercial agent along the transatlantic chain connecting the enslaver to the consumer. The first half of the chapter examines these advocates’ vision of market complicity and their conviction that slave cotton remained morally toxic across its market life. The second half focuses on the rejection of this vision by William Lloyd Garrison, once a supporter of the Free Produce movement. Garrison came to view cotton abstinence as impracticable and marginal to the work of abolition. Remarkably, he argued that free markets and commercial transactions scrubbed slave cotton of moral contamination. Because they were commodities, slave-cotton goods were morally benign and thus “perfectly innocent” to consume.

This chapter takes up the complex and fluid topic of gender in relation to Arthurian romance. It explores the intersections of gender with chivalry, emotion and agency in the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France and their fourteenth-century English reworkings; the gendered treatment of desire, constraint and identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and finally the formative role of gender across Arthur’s reign in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Engagement with gender roles, emotional experience and the place and predicament of women is built into Arthurian romance from its inception, reflecting courtly interests in the nuances of behaviour and feeling. Medieval Arthurian romances repeatedly treat women as wielding profound power, including through unorthodox means of magic, but they also address the constraints of gender roles for women. Malory’s Morte Darthur illuminates the crucial part played by gender in the narrative of the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom, and the conflict between heterosexual and homosocial relations.

World-gothic as a project (where the hyphen indicates a world-systems relational perspective) is not meant to simply expand our horizon, by studying gothic that arises beyond the culture industries of the United States and Europe; it looks to redraw the terms and frames of reference used. A world-gothic approach does not simply seek to highlight non-American-European productions within already existing Eurocentric literary categories, lineages of influence, and definition by generic traits. World-gothic looks instead to change our perspective of how we understand gothic, even for those works already long studied and taught. Using the example of the undead, this chapter examines the time and place of gothic as registering the spasms of the capitalist world-system.

This chapter considers Arthuriana in two distinct linguistic zones: the Celtic languages (excluding Welsh) and Older Scots.  The Arthur of the ‘Gaelic world’ is a figure associated with marvellous, and sometimes comic, adventures – the overtly political themes that persist in Welsh and English writing are usually absent. In the Cornish and Breton regions, Arthur appears in politically complex hagiographical and prophetic material. Older Scots also offers complex and consistent engagement with politics, though from a different vantage point. Here, the dual themes of sovereignty and advice to princes are closely related both to one another and to the long and complex history of contemporary Anglo-Scots political and literary relations. At issue too are crucial questions of geography and national identity.

Tracing back to the uncertain origins of the Tristan legend, this chapter deals first with the earliest written forms of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It then describes the spread of the story throughout Europe, its gradual Arthurianisation, and discusses the place it may have occupied in courtly literature. The Prose Tristan concludes the rivalry between Tristan and Lancelot initiated by Chrétien de Troyes. At the same time, it completes Tristan’s integration into the canon of the Arthurian cycle. In later romances, Tristan is then regarded as equal to Lancelot on the battlefield, and the greatest of the knight-poets.

The period between 1500 and 1700 is sometimes associated with a dip in Arthur’s popularity. In fact, this was a time of Arthurian reinvention, rather than decline: if Arthur did not appear quite as frequently, his appearances nevertheless reached a new peak in terms of their creativity and variety. Increased scepticism surrounding Arthur had a freeing effect, allowing him to be invoked in new and different contexts, from satire to archery shows, and pre-existing Arthurian narratives and geographies were revised. Perhaps unexpectedly, Arthur’s diversification seems to have peaked during the years when Arthur’s narrative was the most potentially dangerous, such as England’s Interregnum and the early Restoration years. At the same time, popular medieval Arthuriana continued to be consumed in manuscript and print; and many local Arthurian traditions were first recorded and brought to wider knowledge during these years.

Chapter 3 continues to explore the question of masquerade and its risks to body and identity. It turns to East Asian novels from the postwar to contemporary eras by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin and Hong Kongese novelist Hon Lai-chu, which all involve queer (auto)fictional narratives. The chapter reads comparatively Mishima’s Confessions (1949), Qiu’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Hon’s Empty Faces (2017), showing that the masquerader is equally present in East Asian life-writing, mediated by the translation and reception of European avant-garde writing in East Asia and by Japan–Taiwan postcolonial relations. Here, masquerade is located in the precarious relations between the mask and the face. The self is brought ’en jeu’ (at stake/at risk) and queered by performances of otherness. Queer autofiction is a masquerade that dismantles rather than determines identity, risking the complete collapse of identity categories. The chain of mimeses shown by the French writers in Chapter 2 is thus mirrored and extended in the East Asian texts.

Chapter 4 examines the tension that exists between the visual and affective functions of the eye, as it plays out in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Bleak House (1853). Exploring how Dickens’s thinking about vision and tears was informed by the scientific journalism published in his weekly periodicals, it posits that his knowledge of ocular neural anatomy shaped his depiction of his characters’ divergent capacities for seeing and feeling. In Bleak House, Dickens also represents tears as part of a wider fluid network of affect that flows freely in and amongst the characters and spaces of the novel. Contemplating how this fluid feeling simultaneously flows out to meet the reader, the chapter reflects on the importance of emotion to his novels’ reception. It argues that Dickens uses affect to move his reader’s eyes, both across the page and beyond it, and that his work illustrates how there are ways of reading with feeling that are already written into the body.

Between 1830 and 1850, anti-Catholics in the United States fixated on the ritual of Catholic confession and priests’ alleged sexual interrogation of young women, especially Protestant teenagers in convent schools. Protestant propagandists tied the moral and sexual contamination of confession to Rome’s supposed political and religious designs in the United States. This chapter examines how female sexual speech, public testimony, and the Protestant press were seen to abet this conspiracy. The first half of the chapter centers on Maria Monk’s blockbuster convent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), and its sensational delineation of young women’s subjection to and participation in confessional sex talk and systemic convent turpitude. The second half studies the dilemma that preoccupied every Protestant publisher who sought to expose the purported sexual dangers of Catholicism and confession: How could one contain Rome’s defiling designs if by exposing Catholicism’s contagious carnality one risked infecting readers and adding them to the conspiracy’s ranks? The chapter’s final section examines the media storm around the Protestant publication of Catholic confession manuals.