Coetzee’s assimilation of photography in prose – through references to images, by way of ocular metaphors, or through an attentiveness to framing, point of view and lighting – owes a debt to a very early and enduring fascination with the camera. He grew up in a family in which photography was ubiquitous, with his mother, the family photographer, making a visual record of domestic life. The family photograph albums, now preserved in the Texas archive, are testimony to the way the family recorded their life across generations. In one of these albums, titled in Coetzee’s own handwriting ‘Photos Ancient and Modern’, there are pages full of photographs of the young Coetzee growing up. But the experience of the child being the object of the camera gaze was also inverted in at least one fascinating moment: it is a remarkable, imperfectly framed image of the mother, captioned ‘Snap of Mother, taken by John. 16th July 1942’. Already at the age of two years, if we take the caption at face value, we must assume that the young Coetzee was a photographer. In taking the Brownie camera – with which he was incessantly being snapped by his mother – into his own hands, the child reversed the roles and turned the lens back at the photographer.

The Conclusion reflects back on the many weeping eyes considered in the course of the book, as well as the insights they provide concerning the tear’s complicated relationship with perception and knowledge, with affect and signification, with gender and power, and with science and sentimentality. It also examines an advertisement for spectacles that illustrates some of the ocular challenges the Victorian periodical press posed to reading eyes. This analysis brings the study back around to affective hermeneutics and to a discussion of the tear as critical lens, a figuration that encapsulates both the theme and method of the project.

This chapter explores Chrétien’s foundational role in the creation and dissemination of Arthurian literature. It begins with a description of the sociohistorical context in which he wrote and a review of the diverse sources on which he drew. He chose as the protagonists of his romances five of Arthur’s knights and created a gallery of attractive and enterprising women to complement their adventures. An examination of the emotions of these female characters, which are tempered by political concerns, informs this essay. The main focus is on Chrétien’s originality – the skill and sophistication of his poetic art, including a masterly use of intertextuality and interlacing. Chrétien delighted in keeping his audience at a distance, inviting critical reflection. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the myriad translations and adaptations his romances inspired in Francophone and other language areas, extending his influence across a wide geographical area and across the ages.

This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

This chapter focuses on “visible” insects with the rise of entomological illustration. Although Maria Sibylla Merian lived outside the parameters of the Enlightenment, she inaugurates the genre of modern entomological illustration, grounding it in the Dutch still-life tradition. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty allows for reflection on Merian’s status as a visible and mobile “body among things,” a corporeal existence caught up in the “fabric” of the world: she lived with her caterpillars and thereby arrested their “inner animation.” Her illustrations capture an ineffable effect – the imprint of her non-human insect kin upon her embodied subjectivity. The chapter then turns to Merian’s legacy and her impact on the British illustrators who follow her: Eleazar Albin, Moses Harris, and Edward Donovan. Donovan’s occlusion of parasitic behavior in one especially aesthetically pleasing insect, the Chrysis ignita, leads to an argument for the necessity of accepting a wider planetary rationale, even when it opposes human assumption.

The area covered by Romance languages, literatures and cultures between 1550 and 1800 is characterised by a decline in the Arthurian tradition and by exchanges which led to the dissolution of the Arthurian romance into the chivalric narrative. The vogue for Carolingian matter may well have led, episodically, to the preservation of Arthurian memories, but overall, it accelerated the decline of the Round Table romances, particularly in Italy. The Iberian and Italian areas promoted heroes such as Amadis and Roland, who were destined for European success, whilst France recovers the Beau Tenebreux, thanks to Herberay des Essarts. During that period, the erosion of the Matter of Britain was more marked in the Roman area than in Britain, where Arthur remained something of a national symbol. Including these derivative heroes (Amadis, Roland/Orlando) allows us to bring to light the specificities of the areas under consideration.

William Wordsworth’s “To a Butterfly” problematically frames a world where the poet does not exist in the same space as the insect. But how does the natural world look back at the human? How do we look to the living planet? Three poets answer this question. First, John Aikin announces a turn towards nature and the natural world in poetry. Barbauld’s “To Mrs. P--, with some Drawings of Birds and Insects” demonstrates the turn put into practice. Selections from James Thomson’s The Seasons elucidate the poet’s close proximity to living, breathing insects who prove sentient and purposeful, as Thomson uses personification to oppose anthropectomy. Insect life in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature reveals his materialist thinking and his recognition that insects are a crucial part of organic process. In his discussion of parasitism in particular we find a pre-modern acceptance of the notion of symbiotic life. In contrast, in “The Caterpillar” by Anna Laetitia Barbauld the parasitic behavior of the European tent caterpillar, or Lackey moth, shows how human ethics can be stretched to their limit when planetary life is observed “looking back.”

The District of Columbia, a federal district overseen by Congress, was a constitutional battleground where freedom nationalists, proslavery firebrands, and supporters of sectional harmony clashed over federal responsibility for slavery. From 1838 to 1859, US Representative Joshua Giddings (Ohio) insisted that the federal government had no constitutional authority to uphold slavery there. His signature claim was that the framers had granted northern states the right not to be made complicit in slavery through any action or policy of the federal government, beyond the Constitution’s requirements. Giddings railed against the persistent battering of this political and moral quarantine. The sensational attempt by over seventy-five enslaved Black residents to flee the nation’s capital in 1848 onboard the Pearl brought unprecedented attention to Giddings’ defense of northern purity rights. This chapter examines Giddings’ notion of a northern right to political innocence and its role in his congressional brawls over slavery in the District of Columbia.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

‘Non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema’ is a diffuse collection of films held together only by the fact that they are not in English and they all bear some kind of nominal or narrative relationship to the tradition of Arthurian story-telling. Despite scant evidence of continuous tradition, including between films in the same language, and long gaps in the corpus, three main strands can be identified: cinematic versions of the Tristan and Iseult legend, films about Perceval and the Holy Grail, and films centred on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The third strand is minor: one of the most notable aspects of non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema is the relative paucity of films about Arthur himself, suggesting a distinct relationship to the Arthurian tradition. This corpus of Arthurian screen texts differs from Anglophone cinema in its narrative emphasis, avant-garde techniques, and in its engagement with cultural, historical and ideological concerns that extend well beyond the Anglosphere.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

This chapter traces the growth of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King from his earliest ideas for an Arthurian epic in his notebooks from the 1830s to the completion of his twelve-book epic in 1886. It examines his treatment of his Arthurian sources, most importantly Malory, and attempts to capture the reactions of nineteenth-century readers to the Idylls by drawing on a range of contemporary reviews. It is difficult to overestimate Tennyson’s role in recentring the Arthurian legend in popular consciousness, and the final section briefly explores the influence of the Idylls on aspects of Victorian popular culture.

Arthurian topics feature in medieval mural painting and sculpture in architecture from the early twelfth century onwards. The ‘spatial’ aspects of these art forms were ideal for medieval patrons to represent and promote themselves to others. They competed through monumental art – be it in their own residence, a town hall, or a church – to show their identity and status. This chapter traces the main trends, iconographical topics, and influences, with consideration of the social and political function of the representation of Arthur and his knights in medieval monumental art.

In Chapter 6 poetry from Scotland is considered in the context of the movement of sheep from the border regions into the Highlands at the time of the Clearances. Although it happened long ago, this traumatic event still colours narratives of sheep in contemporary Scotland. The Northumberland and Scottish Borders and the Cheviot Hills played an important role in the development of sheep breeds. It was here that the Blackface and Cheviot sheep were developed to meet the requirements of the terrain and from where the breeds spread north during the improvements inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment. The arrival of these breeds in Scotland, driven by market forces as well as ideas about improvement, was sudden and violent. In the play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, first performed in 1973, the new breeds of sheep are seen as signifiers of aggressive colonialism that displaced the subsistence-farming crofters so that their lands could be converted to sheep walk. Poets considered in this chapter are Jim Carruth, who writes from first-hand experience as a farmer poet, and Hugh McMillan, whose sympathetic engagement with sheep is both humorous and insightful.