The book’s Introduction begins by considering definitions of folk music, specifically that developed by the International Folk Music Council during the 1950s. I point out that Cecil Sharp’s work had a profound influence on this conception. The underlying logic behind such definitions is a habit of opposition in which folk music is situated as a paradigm of authenticity in contrast to something else tainted with commerce, frivolity, or bourgeois individualism. I show that folk music has most often been understood through a characteristic form of Marxist nostalgia surrounding older forms of culture opposed to modernity, capitalism, mass media, and the culture industry. The appeal of the folk, I suggest, has chiefly been as a vehicle of critique – a way of identifying alternative ways of being. As illustrations, I turn to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anti-colonial vision of Indian nationalism as well as the recent ‘ShantyTok’ trend on TikTok. Ultimately, folk music and song are inextricable from the social communities they have brought to life.

Lancelot is the sole Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes not to have been directly adapted in German. However, the integration of elements of Lancelot material bears witness to an indirect reaction on the part of German Arthurian romance to the provocative and virulent narrative tradition surrounding the Knight of the Cart. From reminiscences of the abduction of the queen in the early narratives, this chapter turns to the radical reinvention of Lancelot as a serial monogamist who works to uphold social order and consolidate Arthurian rule in Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet. It further discusses the remodelling of the fairy upbringing motif in Lanzelet and the anonymous Wigamur. Finally, the remarkable treatment of Guinevere’s abduction in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône is considered in connection with the problematic relationship of the German Arthurian tradition with the otherworld.

Arthurian tourist sites create what Stijn Reijnders, adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux mémoire, calls lieux d’imagination: places that may or may not have their origins in history, but are compelling precisely because they join the real with a desired imaginary. We offer a tour of Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Abbey in the UK, surveying the development of these sites from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) through the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival to today’s New Age religions and media tourism. We argue that Arthurian places are continually co-produced in processes far from finished; moreover, diverse groups have their own investments in such places – and are sometimes in conflict with each other. Thus we conclude with a discussion of two Arthurian sites outside the UK that exemplify how Arthuricity flourishes in unlikely places: the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, and Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s homage to the knights of the Round Table.

This final chapter addresses the loaded question of gothic naming, considering how and why it remains valuable to understand fiction with diverse regional and cultural roots within a (world-)gothic horizon. First we will briefly rehearse the argument that underpins one of this volume’s claim: namely, that to extricate gothic studies from the taxonomic bind in which it is placed concerning fiction from beyond the so-called West, the origin story of the gothic needs to be reconceived. Second we build on and draw together world-cultural and postcolonial theorisations of catachresis to conceptualise the categorisation and linking of discrete world-cultural forms as world-gothic. For ‘the gothic’ to remain useful as a way of designating fiction, we suggest that the term should be understood as just one possible name, which catachrestically – imperfectly and partially – describes heterogeneous and always situated cultural, folk and spiritual responses to the socio-ecological changes wrought in uneven ways by the capitalist world-system.

This chapter introduces Arthurian translations and adaptations originating in medieval Scandinavia, from the earliest translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a late ballad version of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It considers the translations of Marie de France’s Arthurian and Tristan-related works and the three romances of Chrétien de Troyes that made their way into Old Norwegian. The chapter demonstrates how this material had impact on the pre-existing Old Norse literary system, introducing new emotional expression into the saga repertoire, and providing popular motifs that were adopted in later indigenous romances.

Co-written with Hala Jaber, John Nutekpor, and Ewa Żak-Dyndał, this chapter explores the concept of folk music within the framework of migration and discourses of belonging. It takes as its point of departure the experiences of the author, a child of Irish migrants to America, now working in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and three of her doctoral students from Palestine, Ghana, and Poland. The paradoxes often inherent in the concept of folk music are further complicated by the experience of migration in the twenty-first century. An exploration of recent scholarship on music and diaspora, migration, and social inclusion demonstrates the power of ‘folk music’ as a fluid, imagined concept within which identity and belonging can be negotiated. The chapter includes three case studies related to performance research with new migrant communities in Ireland. It concludes that migration fosters the need to create new imaginaries of belonging and that music is a primary strategic resource in this endeavour.

Commencing with the allegorical adaptations and politicisations of Arthurian settings that arose in the wake of the 1688 Revolution, this chapter examines several discrete modes of literary Arthurianism across the long eighteenth century. As Britain formed around them, eighteenth-century English-language writers adapted the character of Arthur to new aesthetic tastes and modified the Arthurian story to suit emergent modes of story-telling, reshaping the vales of the Arthurian myth according to their own cultural and political concerns. The chapter explores the ways in which Arthur was increasingly embroiled in contested debates about English nationhood and English/British national identity whilst also tracing the evolution of the Arthurian legends into a wider Arthurian ‘mythos’ in which the overarching culture, settings, structures, symbols and themes of the Arthurian world became as significant as the individual figures and narratives featured within them.

The chapter argues that the British gothic is not, as has been assumed, the beginning of the gothic as such, but a response to the local effects of transregional capitalist modernisation. The chapter observes that this history was not only financed by enslavement in the Atlantic world, it was accompanied by a pervasive and fundamentally destructive understanding of racial categories that British gothic writing negotiated. Exploring this entangled material and ideological history, the chapter first analyses late eighteen-century British gothic written at a time when the nation was flush with the spoils of enslavement in the Atlantic world. The chapter then discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conceived in the wake of slave-led revolution and uprisings in the Caribbean, abolition concerns, increased industrialisation and escalating industrial action, forges a racialised body around which notions of whiteness can take shape. In the final section, the chapter explores fin de siècle imperial gothic texts that testify to a New Imperialism by registering the increasingly anxious construction of racial identity that attended transregional capitalism at the time.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

This chapter will explore, for the first time, the existence, development and characteristics of a Latin American corpus of contemporary Arthurian literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century), written both in Spanish and Portuguese. So far, the collection and study of texts from the Latin-speaking nations of North, Central and South America (Latin America) has remained unexplored. This chapter will show that this area has suffered from unjust neglect; there is, therefore, an urgency to fill this gap in Arthurian studies. Arthur, Merlin and Isolde are found in the tropical lands of Mexico or the great plains of central Brazil, and their stories were added to local motifs; they add new meanings for different communities of readers. Latin American children and younger readers were equally fond of Arthur – as much as young readers elsewhere.

During the First World War, musical aesthetics in France changed decisively from fin de siècle Symbolism to Modernism. The style quotidien, articulated by Jean Cocteau in his polemic Le coq et l’arlequin, and exemplified by Satie’s concise mélodies, celebrated everyday musical materials, including popular music, and transformed them in a manner analogous to the cubism of Picasso and the surrealism of Apollinaire. Avant-garde composers such as Tailleferre and and Poulenc, both of whom were members of the composers’ collective ‘Les Six’, responded enthusiastically to these new aesthetic currents. Poulenc in particular extended these post-war developments into a body of mélodies that have become part of the international repertory. This chapter begins with a survey of works by some of Poulenc’s contemporaries. It concludes with a discussion of Poulenc’s place as a composer of mélodies and song cycles such as Banalités, Fiançailles pour rire, and most importantly, Tel jour telle nuit.

The settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) occupy dominant positions within the Oceanian region, though this centrality is in part an effect of relationships with surrounding island nations. Reading comparatively across a selection of Oceanian texts, this chapter asks how gothic interludes encode these sometimes-obscured connections, exclusions, and intraregional imperial histories, thus examining gothic as a lexicon in which to map an archipelagic unconscious.

This chapter uncovers the emergence and early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English during the nineteenth century as they circulated across the Atlantic and around the globe. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that these terms initially emerged in direct reference to the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but rather an idea conditioned by Romantic thought. Indeed, it was the concept of folk music that most enchanted writers during this period – writers who were never of the folk they depicted. These terms are a nostalgic reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that have defined modernity. Ultimately, this history exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.

The early nineteenth-century literary revival of the Arthurian legends inaugurated a corresponding resurgence in the visual arts. New printings of historic romances and verse by contemporary poets, notably Alfred Tennyson, furnished artists with Arthurian subjects and stimulated popular demand for their work. Arthurian artworks proliferated everywhere from the Palace of Westminster to the walls of the Royal Academy to the pages of illustrated books. Under Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s leadership, the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites gave fresh forms to Arthurian narratives, imbuing them with melancholy and Romantic passion. In the latter half of the century, the trend spread from Great Britain to America and Canada, where artists introduced Arthurian figures into North American landscapes. In Europe, French, German and Belgian artists drew inspiration from Wagner’s Arthurian operas. The revival persisted into the 1920s, when post-war shifts in artistic and cultural values brought the long florescence of Arthurian art to a close.