The Western conception of haunting in literature typically evokes images of ghosts and other spirits entering our physical plane as a sign of some spiritual or emotional disruption. However, in a marked difference, African, African American and Caribbean cultures and spiritual traditions conceive of hauntings, both ancestral and otherwise, as part of their historical and contemporary epistemology. This essay considers hauntings in the works of African, African American, and Caribbean literature as serving as a bulwark against modernity with its attendant racism, capital exploitation and environmental devastation for colonised people and their descendants in the modern world. Examining short stories by Chinua Achebe, Henry Dumas, and Shani Mootoo demonstrates the multiple ways that African-based spiritual traditions decenter traditional western notions of haunting while simultaneously demonstrating the potential corrective possibilities of these traditions in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly pernicious world for colonised peoples.

Lyrics in folk songs – defined as those ‘most folks are fond of singing’, to quote Phillips Barry (1939 – shape the mysterious processes by which a song can remain widely known as people hear it, re-create it, and keep it singing, sometimes for generations. I identify prevalent strategies in folk-song words – repetition and familiar imagery, rhetorical framings, parodic echoing and interjection, evocation of childhood and youth, voicing catastrophe and grief, formulaic (yet flexible) structural patterning, and call-and-response engagement – that enable people to carry songs onward and also to be carried by them, by creating shared identification, belonging, emotion, humor, participation, and more. Examples include ballads, lyric songs, and hymns from the U.S. Ozark mountains; a French children’s song; commercial 1960s and 1990s pop hits in English; disaster songs about a Pacific Northwest volcanic eruption, a Mississippi flood, an Oregon shipwreck, and a Spanish mine explosion; and Shona responsorial and improvising songs from Zimbabwe.

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.

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.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of the relationship between multinationals enterprises and global value chains, highlighting their role in shaping global capitalism. Since the late nineteenth century, multinationals have used global value chains to integrate resources, labor, and markets, reinforcing economic specialization while promoting technological transfer. However, these processes have also entrenched inequalities, reinforced economic dependencies and exacerbated social disparities. The chapter traces the development of global value chains from the first global economy to post–World War II industrial expansion, exploring how multinational strategies both influenced and were shaped by technological advances and geopolitical changes. It also addresses the impact of recent trends such as a slowdown in global economic integration and geopolitical tensions, which have triggered a shift toward regionalization and the restructuring of global value chains.

‘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.

This chapter addresses Arthurian romance and its transition from manuscript to print in the Renaissance, in its four European heartlands, France, Germany, Iberia and Italy. The first printed editions appear in the last decades of the sixteenth century, and seem to have met with success, with printer-publishers capitalising on the popularity of Arthuriana in manuscript: extending or condensing, resurrecting more obscure romances and adapting them to new tastes, modernising language – but also furnishing, in the face of moralists’ disapproval, alluring prefaces which stress their educational and moral value, and their importance as records of ancestry and hence for the revival of ancestral chivalry. Increasingly, however, publishers look to novelty, turning to new heroes like Amadis de Gaule, or Perceforest, or new adventures for familiar heroes, witness Maugin’s Nouveau Tristan. Ultimately, however, Arthurian romances come to seem trivial, or morally suspect, or simply outdated – and they are largely discarded by printers.

Euro-American intellectuals began by thinking of folklore as relics from a pre-modern era, showing our own nostalgic anti-modernism. Paradoxically, we then subjected folklore to the information control mechanisms of modernity: identification, observation, investigation, collection, classification, analysis, comparison, interpretation, and evaluation – all in service to science, expertise, universities, and the knowledge production industry. Today, we challenge the inscription of folklore studies into the epistemology of modernity and its institutional power structures, especially in terms of its consequences for minorities and people of color. In this chapter I construct a brief history of folksong observation and collecting chiefly in the United States, the region I know best. I attend to how and why the consensus among American folklorists changed over time concerning who are the folk (if not peasants, then who?), what constitutes folksong, and how folksong is to be studied and understood.