This microhistory provides an overview of some of the key moments in the development of multicultural Leicester, from the post-war years through to the early twenty-first century. It does so in order to foreground the conditions conducive for the wealth of literary talent which emanates from the city and which, in the case of writers such as Sue Townsend, Bali Rai, Nina Stibbe and Joe Orton, has achieved mainstream success nationally and internationally. The multicultural character of Leicester is often (mis)understood solely in terms of large South Asian in-migration since the late 1960s. This is a vastly important part of Leicester’s story, although it does not give a fully representative picture.

This chapter examines Collins’s rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Basil (1852), paying particular attention to the transformation of fears related to modern technology and visual culture. Just like Shelley’s mad scientist, Basil is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. If Mary Shelley sought to revamp the supernatural by moving away from ‘the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’, Collins revamps dusty ghosts by setting his tale in London at the heart of modern culture. As a consequence, the sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller exploring the Alps becomes an assault on the senses of the consumer. While Dr. Frankenstein is blinded to the horror of his experiment, Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies that haunt him and literally lead him to the brink of a precipice. Material culture is a ‘phantasmagoria,’ in Walter Benjamin’s terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer, turning the phantasmagorias of the marketplace into a horror motion picture.

Leicester author Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 (1982) was the best-selling novel of the 1980s and forms the basis of the fifth chapter. Through close reading of Townsend’s debut novel, this chapter demonstrates that Leicester’s apparent image problem has been both an obstacle and a boon for regional writers. Using little-known archival materials from Townsend’s personal collection, Kew unearths a secret history of The Secret Diary, to reveal how the city was erased from manuscript drafts and replaced with a nameless ‘anyplace’. This bland suburban backdrop for Adrian Mole’s comic exploits raises questions about national and regional identity, particularly when the teenage diarist starts to document the increasingly multicultural character of 1980s’ Leicester. This chapter takes innovative approaches to reading a well-loved text and is among the first in-depth critical assessments of Sue Townsend, an iconic Midlands writer.

This chapter interrogates the ways in which digital technology is being creatively deployed to augment Sillitoe’s fiction and to reposition his oeuvre as a body of interactive working-class writing in which the reader actualises the text in real time, on the streets of Nottingham. The chapter examines the innovative ways in which Nottingham literature is marketed as ‘rebellious’, in a bid to strengthen support for the city’s literary heritage, attract visitors and generate much-needed revenue. In an increasingly screen-based digital world, literary tourism is a refreshingly grounded cultural activity that deserves scholarly attention and regional funding. In Nottingham, literary tourism is mapping exciting new routes through the city, using innovative technologies.

This chapter explores affective and epistemological challenges posed by the novel diagnostic entities of ‘whole brain death’, ‘brain stem death’ and ‘controlled circulatory death’ as they developed within transfer milieux in the UK and US. Life support technology enabled cyborg hybridities of machine and flesh, and I draw on Annemarie Mol’s concept of diagnosis as assemblage and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ to analyse how writing in medicine and ethics manages the ambiguities of the new deaths. I coin the term ‘clinical necropoetics’ to convey how Gothic imagery, intertextualities and narrative strategies are marshalled to variously express uncertainty or unease or, by contrast, to manage doubt and normalise. Gothic facilitates contradictory meanings, communicating troubling affects and conceptual ambiguity, or eliding these very things. Gothic representations may ‘give a voice to the silenced dead’, in the words of Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, imbuing a dead body with social meaning. At the same time, Gothic can be part of a process of silencing the dead, reducing the dangerous superfluity of meanings that such bodies may bear.

This chapter reflects on music and the gothic body in terms of the contemporary discourses of sonic hauntology. Sonic hauntology posits the conjuration of the ghost of musics past as critique of the zombie state of the present, its pre-emptive suppression of antagonism and abandonment of the future. The post-punk band, Throbbing Gristle (TG), working interstitially in the ‘time out of joint’ of the late 1970s, seized available technologies in order to wage ‘sonic warfare’ (Steve Goodman) through acoustically vibrating and ‘decomposing’ subjectivities and bodies. TG’s ‘metabolic music’ mapped new forces in the post-industrial which would eventually be actualized in the form of what Deleuze dubbed the ‘society of control’. Conjoining rock and roll with the acoustics of the ‘death factory’, they sought to sonically disorganize – to ‘gristleize’ – the disciplined body and to diagram a monstrous becoming-other. So, if current hauntologies tend to cleave to the vengeful energies of nihilation and destitution, this chapter argues rather for a Deleuzian, fertilizing hauntology that springs from affirmation, that asks ghosts what a (vibratory) body can do.

The introduction argues that an understanding of class relations is vital to an understanding of English literary history. A reading of sections of Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sea, The Sea (1978) and E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) demonstrates that writers understood that class determined peoples’ lives in both trivial and significant ways. Karl Marx was right to claim that all existing history has been that of class struggle and argues that class divisions existed well before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modernity, despite claims to the contrary. Representations of class, and an understanding of the nature of class, are intimately intertwined with the history of literature, which is why both have to be studied together, the one illuminating the other. The history of class without literature and literature without class results in an impoverished understanding of both. Political analysis that concentrates on gender and race makes little sense without an understanding of class, further indicating the need to consider and analyse social class as represented in literary texts as well as a determining factor in how literary texts are produced. The introduction also includes an overview of the book and a reflection on aspects of class structure that appear not to have changed.

This chapter considers ‘borderline’ forms of Beckettian adaptation in new media art and video games. Linda Hutcheon’s classic account defines adaptation as an ‘extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art’. Hutcheon’s emphasis on scope presents Beckettian adaptation with significant problems: self-conscious reference to fragmentation and ending is common within Beckett’s body of work itself, and spreads to later adaptations. Recent new media work revisits such problems in citational titles or, more broadly, in the exploitation of a universe or ‘heterocosm’ which is recognisably ‘Beckettian’. This chapter considers two simulations by the artist John Gerrard – Exercise (Djibouti) (2012) and Exercise (Dunhuang) (2014) – and, finally, James Meek’s Beckett (2018), in which the Beckettian ironies of voice and narration are recontextualised in gameplay characterised by a searching enquiry into media. New media forms complicate storytelling (one of the key preoccupations of many theories of adaptation) with a reflexive attention to the target medium and sometimes elaborate a vast secondary architecture based on fragmentary reference to source material. The seemingly infinite scale of the game world is matched by an impression of endless duration, as the simulation unfolds according to multiple variables, and of a potentially infinite number of iterations. I analyse the construction of a Beckettian heterocosm in the light of the notion of the transmedia archive, in which ‘adaptations’ are reconceived not as versions of a pre-existing essence but rather as instances in the iterative, diachronic elaboration of the work.

Recontextualizing Spenser’s 1579 Shepheardes Calender according to book history, the author analyzes its characteristics as a material text. The circumstances of its publication and of the stationer involved, Hugh Singleton, indicate that it was probably subsidized by the Earl of Leicester. The book’s complex design was deeply innovative, and the poet himself appears to have conceived its most unusual features, including its incorporation of a newly devised illustrative program and a commentary, both atypical for a first edition of imaginative fiction or poetry. His Calender samples and reinterprets diverse literary and nonliterary forms and discourses, ranging from humanist eclogues and emblem books to various calendars and popular almanacs, as well as their norms of print. The bibliographical format, paper, typography, and decoration, and the choice, arrangement, and sequence of the various textual parts recall English and continental precedents for printing eclogues and other kinds of books, as well as commentaries, and yet the book introduces various important changes. The twelve original woodcuts were probably devised according to Spenser’s own designs, and the author reveals elaborate symbolism in several selected pictures to show that the 1579 Calender’s illustrations profoundly interact with its poetry. Shedding much new light on its genesis and contents, including its poetics, politics, and satire of the queen’s prospective marriage to the duc d’Anjou, this comprehensive inquiry into the Calender’s first materialization as a book provides invaluable means to advance knowledge of Spenser’s first major poem, his poetic development, and his early reception.

Rather than being an addition to the already copious literature on the subject of Beckett and music, the present chapter analyses György Kurtág’s 2018 opera Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie, scènes et monologues as a particularly interesting case study to examine the relationship between the original and the adaptation. To investigate this general issue, the chapter considers Kurtág’s intention to remain faithful to the text as much as possible, despite the need to transpose the play into a completely different genre and medium. In particular, it takes issue with John Bryant’s ‘fluid text’ principle, which argues for the inclusion of all forms of adaptation (whether authorial or not) into the work’s genesis. The detailed account of the libretto highlights Kurtág’s subtle yet significant additions to Beckett’s original text, mostly for the purpose of enhancing the dramatic effect and fleshing out covert intertextual allusions. Both these interventions go against the Beckettian spirit that the great composer holds in high regard, the stance that is corroborated by his interest in the manuscripts of Fin de partie. Taking into account Kurtág’s ‘un-Beckettian’ libretto and seemingly unorthodox scenography, the question the chapter attempts to answer is whether there are compelling arguments to consider Kurtág’s opera a ‘fluid text’ and thus to implicitly treat Samuel Beckett as a posthumous co-author of his play’s transgeneric and transmedial adaptation.

Before exploring the diverse and exciting literature which emanates from the West Midlands, this introduction first interrogate how London cannily adopted Stratford-Upon-Avon’s most famous son; why the West Midlands struggles to take ownership of its cultural legacies; and how ‘tall poppy syndrome’ may contribute to talented writers leaving the Midlands for London. Is the aspiration of a Midlands writer to be, as Auden wryly reflects, ‘like some valley cheese/ local, but prized elsewhere’?