In the modern African novel, traditional narrative forms such as anecdotes, epigrams, parables, proverbs, folktales, etc. usually have three-pronged significations: they are didactic being the mechanism through which traditional societies pass moral lessons; and ornamental: the ‘palm oil with which words are eaten’; thirdly, traditional narratives embed African tradition and world view in the modern novel. But what is hardly explored in criticism is the way traditional narratives function as the core structure of the novel and as such become the wellspring of meaning, disseminating sense through the length and breadth of the novel.

Such is the significance of the folktale which Papa Nnukwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus shared with Ifeoma's household at Nsukka. Whereas the story is ostensibly about the world of animals (fable), the animal characters and their actions typify the politicians and the malpractices that are recognizable in postcolonial Nigerian politics. The folktale is a story-within-story that becomes the nerve center of the novel as it allegorizes the excessive egoism; the simplistic solutions to complex social problems as well as overindulgence of the political class, issues that are the central problematic of the macro story of Purple Hibiscus. Also, the folktale highlights Adichie's concern about environmental preservation as it seems to equate careless consumerism with relentless environmental degradation.

Drawing allegorical significations from the folktale, this article argues that Purple Hibiscus represents Nigerian politicians as ogres unconscionably consuming the future of the next generations. In sum, the argument demonstrates the symbolic parallels between the world of the fable and the political domain of postcolonial Nigeria, and shows that the macro narrative of Purple Hibiscus is, in fact, an expansion of the folktale.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Menzer Forest was in the red. As Theodor Fontane tells it in Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Wanderings through the March Brandenburg, 1862–89), the forest, located around Lake Stechlin in the County of Ruppin north of Berlin, had become a problem for the Prussian government because the cost of managing it was greater than the value it produced in the form of timber and game. One solution was to make the forest a site of glass production, and Fontane writes that at one point curls of smoke were to be seen above the trees by day and the glow of fires by night. Finally, though, the government mulled the idea of using the trees as wood to heat the buildings in Berlin. Tasked with determining how long the forest would last if it were to be cut for firewood, the forestry office confidently asserted, “die Menzer Forst hält alles aus” (the Menzer Forest can withstand anything). What happened next was painfully predictable.

Incipit

In two manuscripts, a prose incipit – “Incipit Cronica que Vox Clamantis dicitur” – appears ahead of the Prologue to the first Book. Evidently a later addition, but clearly authorial, it evidences Gower's attempt to smooth the integration of the freshly composed Visio Anglie into the extant six-Book VC as a new Book I.

Prologue

The Vox Clamantis has the clear purpose of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present, an intention it makes clear in this first of three prologues (Books II and III will have theirs too) and in frequent observations throughout the poem. That intention will be certified by an interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Book VII, and retrospectively recertified in the poem's final form with a reading of the Great Rising of 1381, added late as Book I. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides, for the Divine knows and governs everything that is and happens. (Doubtless, Gower would have subscribed to George Santayana's dictum about history, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while perhaps rephrasing it to say that those who fail to read correctly the lessons of the past are not only condemned to repeat them, but condemned simpliciter.) Gower sets out to instruct the newly crowned boy-king in what can be learned from history and experience.

Locating Faust

Mention the name “Faust” and a host of received iconography is likely to come to mind. The familiar picture begins with a medieval scholar alone in his gothic cell, its ponderous arches and high vaulted ceiling cloistering a laboratory-study crammed with dusty old tomes and alchemical paraphernalia like retort and alembic, mortar and pestle, flask and spirit lamp. Poring over an enormous book, its open pages inscribed with occult signs and mystic formulae, the professor-magician sits wrapped in the draping folds of his voluminous robe. On his head rests a floppy, velvet-lined hat, not unlike, perhaps, the one worn by Erasmus in the famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. An hourglass and skull can be glimpsed somewhere in the scene, perched precariously in the back on a slanting shelf, or tossed into the foreground amongst the general clutter that fills his desk and spills out onto the stone-tiled floor. Perhaps he is not alone; a devilish Mephistopheles may be skulking nearby, wearing tights and feathered cap no doubt, frozen in some prancing pose and sporting a villainous smirk. Somewhere above or below this image that recalls the etchings of Albrecht Dürer, or the billowy scenery of Murnau's classic silent film, hangs the name “FAUST,” ornately lettered in the old gothic typeface known as Fraktur. The entire scene breathes German-ness. One can almost smell the heaviness and the dark. Lurking right below the surface or just beyond the frame are presentiments of necromancy, of invisible, hovering specters urging Faust on to the ruthless pursuit of power, fabulous riches, concupiscent pleasures—evil, in other words, in all its shapes and forms. It is a story leading to the conclusion we all know in which Faust, that familiar emblem of riotous overreach, is ultimately damned by God for all eternity.

Speculative fiction! Science fiction! Afrofuturism! African Futurism! Africanfuturism! Afrifuturism! Afrojujuism! Africanjujuism! Africannearfutures! These are all specifically black appropriations of the now global futurist movement popularized in 1909 by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in The Manifesto of Futurism. Sankofalike, these African or Afro versions of futurism look forward while remaining, intentionally or not, firmly grounded in a present that looks back toward a potentially usable black past. In Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L’Aventure ambiguë, we do not see phenomena like ‘how the tortoise or spider travelled to heaven to encounter God’ as portrayed in African speculative fiction (Egbunike & Nwankwo 1) or the hyperrealistic decors and gadgets associated with Afrofuturistic or Africanfuturistic science fiction. The novel is not set in the future or in some free-flowing speculative space located far, far away. Far from it; it is firmly rooted and happening in the ever-changing present that bogs us down in its muck, myopia, and hubris that diminish humanity.

What the novel does is take us back to the fundamentals as it helps us imagine the possibilities of a new and salutary planetary coexistence. In this sense, therefore, and given the central role of identity-formation and agency in the poiesis and praxis of futurism, L’Aventure ambiguë is a thoroughly futuristic novel, making Cheikh Hamidou Kane an African precursor of the genre.

So far this book has made the case for an afterlife of Beowulf in Anglo- Scandinavian history from the mid-tenth century onwards. The old poem would have been politicised in the reign of Cnut, with copies made in areas of England friendly to the Danes, as I have suggested in the case of the Nowell Codex, for which a post-war creation seems likely in Lichfield in 1017. In the early 1020s the putative royal copy in Winchester would have inspired Cnut to cultivate a Skaldic ideology of ‘Skjǫldr’ and the ‘Skjǫldungar’ on the basis of ‘Scyld’ and the ‘Scyldingas’. Cnut's Skjǫldung ideology was passed down from one Icelandic skald to another until the end of the twelfth century, by which time its power had been reinforced with knowledge of the (Beowulf-derived) Scealdwa in the West Saxon regnal lists. Eventually the Icelanders promoted Skjǫldr and the Skjǫldungar through networks connecting England to Iceland through the Danish archdiocese of Lund in Skåne. Central to this promotion was the priest chieftain Sæmundr Sigfússon (1056–1133), who would have learned of Skjǫldr's place in West Saxon genealogy through his connection with Denmark. From a library in Lund or Roskilde or Odense, Sæmundr would have obtained a manuscript in the early twelfth century which contained this genealogy. The Skjǫldung genealogy which Sæmundr publicised in or after 1120 both flourished in Iceland and returned to Denmark in a new written form. In both countries it enabled a number of influential historical and mythographical works. Not only did Skjǫldr feature in the historiography of Sven Aggesen and Saxo in Lund in the later twelfth century, but his dynasty got its own saga in Skjǫldunga saga, probably in Oddi in the early 1180s. Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), fostered there as a child by Sæmundr's grandson Jón Loptsson, introduced both Skjǫldr and Scealdwa and the latter's West Saxon genealogy into the origin-myth for the euhemerised Óðinn which appears with Skjǫldr in his Ynglinga saga in the 1220s; and which later, probably through his household in Reykholt in the late thirteenth century, appears with Scealdwa in the Prologue to the Prose Edda.

What is nature? It is a question that evokes an answer that is both theoretical and practical. The early nineteenth century took up this question by investing time and human energy into unlocking the world of the unseen, which to many held the fullness of all knowledge, whether it be defined deep within the Earth or far into the sky. For example, the relatively new scientific profession of geology was taken up throughout Europe as a way to engage the on-going debates on the formation of the Earth. The debate began in the eighteenth century between the so-called ‘plutonists’, who believed that the rock bed of the Earth was formed by the deposit of lava from volcanoes, and the so-called ‘neptunists’, who believed that the land was formed by sediment from one enormous flood. The discussion became even more pronounced with the ability to carve paths deeper into the Earth, which allowed for a more adventurous and entrepreneurial group of individuals to discover the riches of such depths and force the debate to enter the industrial and economic realms. The mining industry thus became for the nineteenth century a fascination of wonder, commerce and scientific research, so much so that German philosophers would often use the mine as a metaphor to define the depths of the human soul and the progress of industrial society.

Equally far reaching, the celestial experiments of William Herschel (1738– 1822) and his sister Caroline (1750–1848) in the early 1800s brought increased attention to light rays that lie outside the visual spectrum, namely infrared radiation. By placing a mercury thermometer outside the red band of sunlight refracted from a prism in a dark room, William came to understand the existence of ‘invisible light’ and the possibility of ‘seeing’ beyond our own world.

Part I of this study was dedicated to the Musenhof as a site of polite sociability, republic of letters, and dynastic and reform patriotism. This chapter will continue the exploration of Musenhofe in the conglomerate state of Denmark. Eutin and Emkendorf, the case studies in this chapter, were significant centres of enlightenment and literary patronage in the Danish Schleswig and Holstein.

Eutin – one of the two ‘Weimars of the North’ was the summer residence of Friedrich August von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1711–85) and Peter Friedrich Ludwig von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1755–1829) in the eastern part of Holstein. These princely bishops, or Furstenbischofe, were descended from the old dynasty Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, with territories that belonged to both Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. Linked by marriage to Russia, the dynasty produced Tsar Peter III Fjodorowitsch (Karl Peter Ulrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, 1728–62) and his son Paul I (1754–1801), who governed the Gottorf territories in personal union with Russia until 1773. The treaty of Tsarkoye Selo granted Denmark the Gottorf territories, which therefore governed the whole of Holstein as part of its conglomerate state. Both Friedrich August and Peter Ludwig were prominent patrons of the arts. They attracted writers and philosophers to the court, many of whom had close connections to the Danish court and public sphere, but also to other German circles. The dramatist Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737–1823), for instance, lived in Copenhagen between 1765 and 1775 and was part of the German circle around Klopstock. Gerstenberg and his fellow editors Christian Fleischer and Peter Kleen published Soroske Samling, a periodical that signified a true symbiosis of Danish-German culture in the conglomerate state.

In the past decade, new subfields of German-language comics have been growing. This includes comics by German artists that attempt to capture the trauma of migrant experiences in Germany. Recent examples include works such as Paula Bulling's Im Land der Frühaufsteher (In the Country of Early Risers, 2012) and Reinhard Kleist's Der Traum von Olympia: Die Geschichte von Samia Yusuf Omar (2015; An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar, 2016) and Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel: Comic-Reportagen von Augsburger Design-Studierenden (Stories from the Grand Hotel: Comic Reports by Augsburg Design Students, 2016). These comics are often rendered in documentary style and portray the artist's experiences with displaced persons. In addition, in line with the international rise of the field of Graphic Medicine, health-related comics, often about lived experiences of illness and disability, have emerged in Germany, ranging from Daniela Schreiter's Schattenspringer series (2014, 2015, 2018; The World Beyond My Shadow, 2016), which deals with autism, to Regina Hofer's Blad (2018; Fat, 2021), which portrays experiences related to eating disorders and body image. In the last decade, fictional comics about nature and climate crisis have gained prominence in the national and international comics scene and include works such as Frauke Berger's Grün (Green, 2018).

For centuries and across cultures, commentary was the fundamental method of approaching textual teaching and learning, and yet today, outside a few very particular settings, it has fallen out of fashion in the West. What has brought about this shift away from commentary as the mainspring of the advancement of knowledge, and why did it lose its appeal? Conversely, what made commentary such a keystone of earlier classrooms and societies?

The most basic definition of commentary is the writing of one text around the structure (often physical as well as metaphorical) of another – that other being a text prior in time and in some sense in importance to the comment. So to think about the questions posed above, it is clear we must begin with the central feature presupposed by commentary as a genre: the existence of an authoritative text. Imbuing a text with authority in turn presupposes the idea of a canon of materials with protected status in a hierarchy of significance. The acceptance of such a canon can account for the popularity of commentary in certain disciplines, most notably law, religion, and classical literature, each of which has a recognised text or group of texts at its core. Students begin by learning these texts, often by rote; but as their knowledge advances they must also grapple with the inconsistencies, imprecisions, and silences found within them, along with new problems raised by changing circumstances or lived reality in a time or culture removed from that in which the text was created.

… le colonisateur, qui, pour se donner bonne conscience, s’habitue à voir dans l’autre la bête, s’entraîne à le traiter en bête, tend objectivement à se transformer lui-même en bête.

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur la colonisation (1955: 8)

Our Share of Night (2022) by Mariana Enríquez is a fantasy horror novel that tells the story of a secret sect called the Order, which seeks to seize the knowledge of a god called the Darkness. To achieve this, they enslave powerful mediums from racialized lower classes who establish contact with the god. The turning point comes when the last medium, Juan, weary of a life of subjugation and exploitation, rises against his oppressors, embarking on a life-and-death battle to reclaim his freedom and protect his kin. Enríquez shapes a narrative that critically confronts the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83), making the novel an allegorical fractal that can be viewed through a decolonial lens. From this perspective, both the Order and the dictatorship uphold European values of domination and colonialism, perpetuating the division between the white man and the Other by creating a Manichean separation between colonizers and the colonized, between domination and exploitation, and between bodies that exploit and bodies that are exploitable.

In this chapter, I analyze Our Share of Night as an allegory of colonialism. In doing so, I highlight the figures of the monster and the beast as metaphors for both the colonial and decolonial worlds, while examining the effects of internal colonialism.