Edward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe developed accounts of participatory sin and moral complicity that wed the moral critique of the slave system to the religious and moral assessment of individuals occupying diverse roles in the system. In different ways, the siblings insisted that personal sin and responsibility must be rethought from a system perspective. The first half of the chapter examines Beecher’s controversial notion of organic sin and how it staked a middle ground between antislavery conservatives and radicals. The second half of the chapter discusses how Stowe, like her brother, battled rigid moral individualists who dismissed system thinking as methodologically and morally misguided. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), broadening moral realism to include system analysis, figures the slave system as a moral object that demands examination and critique. Moving beyond the capacities of the sermon and debate essay, the literary allowed Stowe to perform this exposure and critique.

This chapter investigates how the eye was understood medically, philosophically, and analogically in the first half of the eighteenth century. It outlines how figures of sight, blindness, and recovery of sight were employed both before and after significant ophthalmological developments in the middle of the period. Drawing on anatomical treatments of the eye and vision by William Chesselden and William Porterfield, the chapter begins by investigating analogies for eyesight in poetry by Henry Brooke and Richard Blackmore that figure the eye as a perfect, designed instrument that is akin to a camera obscura. It explores how descriptions and models for the processes of vision are largely distanced from the individual’s experience of sight as well as the implications this has for the valuation of sighted and non-sighted experience. The chapter then focuses on eighteenth-century engagements with Molyneux’s Question by considering its implications for thinking about individualised sensory experience as the source of knowledge, the relationship between the senses, and competing philosophical accounts of interactions between the perceiving individual and the lived environment. The final section considers surgical interventions by William Chesselden and John Taylor of Hatton Garden. The chapter closes with a reading of Richard Jago’s fictionalised explorations of blindness and recovered sight in Edge-Hill.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

Chapter 5 examines how certain conventions of the sentimental genre – like the tear and the man of feeling archetype – are taken up in the sensation fiction of Wilkie Collins. Focusing primarily on The Woman in White (1860), it suggests that Collins uses the tear as a staging point from which to mount an argument about the limits of materialism. With characters such as the infamous villain Count Fosco, he highlights the dangers involved in completely conflating emotion and physiology. With this in view, while it has become customary to see the sensation novel as a genre that addresses itself specifically to the nerves, The Woman in White pre-emptively warns its readers not to strip bodily responses of their potential for meaning.

Embracing Kunzru’s own early love of French theory and reading these works through a detailed engagement with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis, Upstone reveals the capacity of Kunzru’s multimodal literature to engage with a materiality of both the literary and non-literary object. In the second part of the essay, the implications of this form for Kunzru’s ongoing concern for globalised identities and the pursuit of social justice are examined, identifying a discourse of ‘resistant rhythms’ which question racial, capitalist and ableist norms. For Upstone, the pursuit of these features simultaneously through both form and content defines Kunzru as what can be referred to as a transglossic author, a term drawn from work undertaken with Shaw (2021) that aims to evolve a new critical framework for the trends of twenty-first-century fiction. Broader than Coupland’s notion of translit, Shaw and Upstone’s transglossic takes as its foundation six core literary features - deep simultaneity, planetary consciousness, intersectional transversality, artistic responsibility, productive authenticity and trans-formalism – the conjunction of which typifies a work of contemporary literature. Kunzru’s writing provides a model of how such features concretely manifest in contemporary fiction. Despite their differences, each of his works represents a globalised political commitment, simultaneous presence of intersectional identity categories and a renegotiation of concepts of reality. As these are realised through both theme and content, and are driven by an authorial responsibility evidenced in Kunzru’s media activity and political activism, they come to encompass transglossic literature’s defining characteristics.

Chapter 9 defines the invisibility and inequality that affect indigenous peoples as a problem also for international investment law. The chapter argues that the international investment law regime perpetuates both invisibility and inequality. The regime perpetuates invisibility because it is firmly grounded on the principle that governments represent all the peoples in its territory, and inequality, on the strong protection of investors. From this perspective, the authors argue, two questions arise for the international investment lawyer: what to do when the facts of a case, for instance mounting resistance, make it clear that the local government does not represent indigenous peoples; and what to do when the promotion of sustainable development for indigenous peoples clashes with the protection of investors. The chapter addresses these questions through the deconstruction of the mainstream concept of statehood and of the neoliberal belief that the protection of investors reverts to continuous development for all. The chapter draws on critical statehood scholarship, on critical development theories, and on energy justice studies to bring visibility and justice to indigenous peoples and to affirm them as full participants, on their own terms, in international investment law. On a theoretical level, this is a conceptual chapter that falls within socially informed critiques to international law.

This chapter explores the transformation of medieval Arthurian knowledge in early modern Germany, starting with the last Meisterlieder from Hans Sachs and his followers till the middle of the sixteenth century, when medieval Arthurian literature gradually fell out of fashion. Only the Wigalois adaptations and the Prose Tristan were still printed until the late seventeenth century, and a few Arthurian topoi remained as well during this ‘Arthurian break’: the name of the sword of the king, the adultery of the queen and the opulence of the king’s court. The rediscovery of medieval literature in Germany after 1750 by Bodmer and his followers did not manage to remodel and adapt this material but instead connected the medieval tradition with classical models.

This chapter considers the Middle English Arthurian verse romances, and the ways in which these texts interact with the genre of Middle English romance at large. First, the chapter explores the relationship between expected audiences and the choice to write in verse when considering Arthurian subject matter. The chapter then turns to romances usually designated as non-Arthurian, and asks: to what extent do Arthur and his knights creep into narratives set outside, beyond or without the Arthurian court, and what might this tell us about the cultural impact of Arthurian material in medieval England? Finally, a number of romance tropes – the fair unknown, the loathly lady, and intruders of all kinds – are used to show Middle English verse romance’s potential to both reinforce and disrupt Arthurian courtly values.

Sir Thomas Malory’s late fiftenth-century prose work Le Morte Darthur is the most substantial Middle English account of the legendary king, and has strongly influenced later Arthurian writers, including Tennyson, Twain and T. H. White. We know little about  Malory and his reasons for writing (in prison); was it a commission? The Morte was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, and frequently reprinted, but only one manuscript copy survives. I discuss Malory’s adaptation of the familiar story, using a remarkable range of sources in several languages. He gives surprising prominence to Lancelot, not a popular figure in the English tradition, and chooses to include the Grail Quest, in which most knights fail. I consider Malory’s deceptively plain style, his values, his attitudes to women, and also his historical context; he fought in the Wars of the Roses, so Arthur’s rise and fall must have had particular significance for him.

This chapter is on the print aspect of ballads. Part one shows that theatre ballads were published as occasion-specific souvenirs, and asks when stationers (i.e., publishers) commissioned theatre ballads, when they ‘stole’ them, and when they simply accepted them from authors and playhouses. It focuses on John Danter, John Trundle and Abel Jeffes, who sent their own chapmen (roving sellers of print texts) to trade around the playhouses. Part two considers normal and celebrity popular ballad writers, like William Elderton, Thomas Deloney, Richard Johnson and Martin Parker, investigating the sums of money they might make from publishers. Part three explores purchasers who bought theatre ballads for their print qualities: to use as wastepaper, decoration, or reading matter.

This chapter explores the cross-cultural dissemination of Arthurian literature through the lens of a single case study: the lai of Lanval, attributed to Marie de France. It begins by discussing the figure of Marie, her works, and her compositional practice, situated in the wider twelfth-century contexts of multilingual, cross-Channel literary cultures and the development of Arthurian narratives and vernacular literary forms. The study then considers the dissemination of Lanval in terms of its manuscript tradition, as well as through analogues, adaptations, translations, and other textual traces or allusions. As such, the study follows both Lanval and Lanval across medieval Europe, through the Welsh Marches, England, northern France, Flanders, Norway, Swabia and Austria.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

The origins of Arthur are in the Welsh language, and this chapter presents the Welsh Arthur from those origins to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. While Geoffrey of Monmouth reconfigured the Arthur he found, propelling him into a new trajectory, the Galfridian route does not provide the telos for the Welsh material: the most important manuscripts of the period show court poets and prose writers engaging self-consciously with traditions old and new, aware of the colonial implications of French and English Arthurs, and energetically navigating strategies of irony, satire, postcolonial reimagining and culturally confident re-engagement with the pre-Galfridian (and pre-Chrétien). Arthur is at once signifier of the ‘Britain’ of the bards (a half-imagined Welsh-speaking Britain, inheritor of Romanitas) and a field of signification on which to project contemporary political realities, over the best part of a good millennium.

Most sheep are domesticated, but much discourse about these creatures is based on the distinction between wild and domestic. The second chapter explores the main differences between wild and domestic, in terms of how humans construct their relationship across the species boundary. The St Kilda archipelago is the most remote part of the British Isles. Hirta was the only island to be inhabited until 1930, but in that year this community left for good. In 1932, 107 sheep were relocated from Soay to Hirta and left to become wild. The population ecology of this wild population is of great interest to ecologists and has been intensively researched, first from 1959 to 1967 and since 1985 through the Soay Sheep Project. The sheep on Hirta have the potential to inform discussion by ecocritics of issues such as the difference between wild and domestic, the ethics of watching populations starve and crash without intervention and the overall impact on biodiversity of this strategy of knowing all, but not intervening. The chapter considers the prose writing of Kathleen Jamie and the poetry of Donald S. Murray and New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen, whose ancestors left Hirta in 1851.

Chapter 5 turns to intermedial comparison between word and image, taking the image-text as an example to examine how ludic strategies of representation create intermedial experiences of risk. In the chapter I compare Xi Xi with contemporary French poet Michèle Métail. Both poets have created a substantial number of image-texts. I first examine how they employ ekphrasis – the verbal representation of images – to explore the tension and complementarity between language and visual media and emphasize the risks of aesthetic experimentation and mediated perception. I then discuss their use of the parergon, understood as the concrete borders of an artwork (the ergon) and, figuratively, as a cognitive framing and recontextualization of literature that questions what the literary work is. Gregory Bateson argued that play is a ‘cognitive frame’ (1972). In this chapter, I argue that the parergon is a ludic method that suggests the transgression of frames and puts the artwork (ergon) at risk. Image-texts show how risk is shaped by medium-specificity and technologies of mediation.