Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s fiction blends Yoruba cosmology and modernist aesthetics. This blend renders the critical tendency to juxtapose the Indigenous and the modern, via the spiritual and the material, impossible. Instead, Tutuola’s fiction is an Indigenous response to mid-century West African modernisation and industrialisation under global capitalism. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology, this response offers an immanent critique of colonial modernity’s capitalist world-system by refusing to separate the spiritual and the material, thereby adapting a ‘folk’ logic that capitalism allegedly replaced. This survival of Indigenous cosmology into modernity demonstrates an analogous relationship between Tutuola’s animist realism and the gothic, a form that likewise offers an immanent critique of global capitalism by way of adapting folk logics. This analogous relationship leads this chapter to comparatively read Tutuola’s vision of the uncanny alongside the Freudian uncanny, highlighting the need for world-gothic criticism to situate the gothic alongside non-Western forms that render a shared modernity uncanny.

Creative engagement with the Arthurian myth has been prolific in the modern period and shows no sign of abating. This chapter provides a panoramic shot, an overview of how and where the Arthurian myth surfaces in texts in English in Great Britain and Ireland from 1920 to the present. Additionally, it provides close-ups, more detailed readings of selected works that capture the critical concerns of modern artists and their audiences, foregrounding especially trauma and the impacts of war and industrialised culture; expressions of the interconnectedness between all living things, often in response to contextual ecopolitical crises; and human interactions, including tragic relationships and empowering female networks. The discussion breaks materials into broad categories that are loosely determined by form – poetry, prose and drama – and moves between foundational works and newer narratives. Where possible, the discussion foregrounds Arthuriana that has previously received little or no attention, especially works by women.

This chapter’s exploration of Derek Walcott’s poetry both describes and practices a critical “stereo vision,” in which Jamesian pragmatism and Walcott’s hybridized, postcolonial poetic practices productively refract one another, helping to “illuminate a new direction for Jamesian theorizing in literary studies.”

Why is Robinson Crusoe’s island insect-free, when evidence suggests that Defoe was aware of their importance to thriving ecosystems? Following Amitav Ghosh’s arguments in The Great Derangement, the chapter explores how human-insect entanglement would have impacted a character like Crusoe. On the one hand, a variety of insects would have proved debilitating as they invaded his body and his dwelling space. Crusoe’s sense of sovereignty would have been sorely compromised by many pernicious creatures. On the other hand, insects would also have made his island livable. Insects not only pollinate and make human agriculture possible, but they also remove rotting flesh and other decaying matter. However, including insects in the representation would mitigate any novelistic purpose committed to the construction of a mythic, self-determining, self-enclosed, and autonomous hero like Crusoe. In this omission of entanglement, the world of the human becomes the place where the insect is not.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

This chapter is about how William James’s ideas about consciousness can elucidate our understanding of what literature is and does. The thrust of the argument is that James’s psychology, in its insistence on and poetic invocation of consciousness as being nothing outside of the processing of the world as experienced, and the radically experiential and pluralistic philosophy built on this claim, offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytical models of consciousness as a mechanism of suppression and censorship that dominate the field of literary studies to this day, with vast implications for our conception of literature’s social function and use. The aim is to show how James’s ideas about consciousness are endowed with a radical openness to sense perception that comes with both an aesthetics of cognition and an ethics of democratic receptivity in tow; and to demonstrate that James fathoms these two strands as mutually engaged in a world-making operation that necessitates a literary imagination.

This chapter examines Welsh-language Arthurian literature from c.1500 to the twentieth century, examining both prose and poetry and considering the fusion of the ‘native’ and the ‘non-native’ and questions of cultural continuity. References from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts are situated in a palimpsestic view of Britain, acknowledging the political realities of the present while also invoking a vision of the unconquered heroic ancestors of the Welsh. The shift from manuscript to print culture is followed, including a look at Arthurian literature in the burgeoning Welsh periodical press. It is suggested that twentieth-century reworkings of Arthurian traditions include romantic effusions as well as experimental modern explorations, all set within the context of textual articulations of Welsh national identity.

Chapter 5 addresses poetic representations of embodied perception including disturbed or inhibited sight, compensatory sensibility, and the interplay between the nerves and the senses in the construction of knowledge and experience. The models of embodied perception offered here correspond with a preoccupation with the limits of knowledge in contrast to the camera obscura model explored in Chapter 4. The first section of the chapter outlines a mid-century emphasis on the body’s role in individual perception by exploring descriptions of sight in topographical poetry by Thomas Gray, James Thomson, and Mark Akenside, together with accounts of sensory description in the work of the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. The subsequent section addresses models of spiritual perception and embodiment in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and the religious poetry of William Blake. The second half of the chapter introduces the impact of Hartleian associationism and eighteenth-century accounts of the nerves and sensation. Finally, poetic examples from Akenside to Coleridge demonstrate the emergence of the Aeolian harp as an analogy for imaginative creation and sensory engagement.