In the debate on the impact of multinationals on society, the “labor question” has occupied a prominent role for many decades. Surveying this debate, the chapter starts by outlining the main challenges posed by multinationals, in particular with regard to their ability to continuously reshape their production geographies. The main part of the chapter addresses two core issues. First, it provides a literature survey on the labor impact of multinationals, distinguishing between the Global South where the impact of multinationals occurred in the wider context of colonialism and, later, decolonization, and the Global North where discussion of the “labor question” revolved around issues of offshoring and labor relations practices. In the second part, the chapter analyzes the role of organized labor (especially trade unions) in multinationals, placing equal emphasis on domestic strategies and efforts to establish transnational bodies for interest representation.

The origins of Arthur are in the Welsh language, and this chapter presents the Welsh Arthur from those origins to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. While Geoffrey of Monmouth reconfigured the Arthur he found, propelling him into a new trajectory, the Galfridian route does not provide the telos for the Welsh material: the most important manuscripts of the period show court poets and prose writers engaging self-consciously with traditions old and new, aware of the colonial implications of French and English Arthurs, and energetically navigating strategies of irony, satire, postcolonial reimagining and culturally confident re-engagement with the pre-Galfridian (and pre-Chrétien). Arthur is at once signifier of the ‘Britain’ of the bards (a half-imagined Welsh-speaking Britain, inheritor of Romanitas) and a field of signification on which to project contemporary political realities, over the best part of a good millennium.

The French attitude about what is called the performing arts, since at least Verlaine, has been to consider that the formal aspect has to do with the meaning of a text, or a situation, and that nothing can be taken as accessory. For performers, the mélodie is, in that sense, at the heart of this concern. Henri Duparc’s celebrated setting of Baudelaire’ “La vie antérieure” provides a case study for the importance of a sensitive, careful, understanding of the poetic text in interpreting French song. Deepening work both on the form and meaning of all songs, whatever the language, without fabricating the sound, is the goal to achieve. The unspoken, the undetermined, in a word, the mystery of the world is what counts; the expression is neither a definition nor an explanation, but a quest. Recitalists are explorers of the unknown!

Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s fiction blends Yoruba cosmology and modernist aesthetics. This blend renders the critical tendency to juxtapose the Indigenous and the modern, via the spiritual and the material, impossible. Instead, Tutuola’s fiction is an Indigenous response to mid-century West African modernisation and industrialisation under global capitalism. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology, this response offers an immanent critique of colonial modernity’s capitalist world-system by refusing to separate the spiritual and the material, thereby adapting a ‘folk’ logic that capitalism allegedly replaced. This survival of Indigenous cosmology into modernity demonstrates an analogous relationship between Tutuola’s animist realism and the gothic, a form that likewise offers an immanent critique of global capitalism by way of adapting folk logics. This analogous relationship leads this chapter to comparatively read Tutuola’s vision of the uncanny alongside the Freudian uncanny, highlighting the need for world-gothic criticism to situate the gothic alongside non-Western forms that render a shared modernity uncanny.

Creative engagement with the Arthurian myth has been prolific in the modern period and shows no sign of abating. This chapter provides a panoramic shot, an overview of how and where the Arthurian myth surfaces in texts in English in Great Britain and Ireland from 1920 to the present. Additionally, it provides close-ups, more detailed readings of selected works that capture the critical concerns of modern artists and their audiences, foregrounding especially trauma and the impacts of war and industrialised culture; expressions of the interconnectedness between all living things, often in response to contextual ecopolitical crises; and human interactions, including tragic relationships and empowering female networks. The discussion breaks materials into broad categories that are loosely determined by form – poetry, prose and drama – and moves between foundational works and newer narratives. Where possible, the discussion foregrounds Arthuriana that has previously received little or no attention, especially works by women.

The entanglement of genre and gender in the theories and practice of French art song shaped women’s creative engagement with the mélodie. They were active as composers and poets, as well as performers, hostesses, singing teachers, and muse; yet they faced gendered prejudice. Closer examination of songs by Pauline Viardot and Augusta Holmès reveals markedly different strategies by female composers when addressing gender in their settings. Some female poets (such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anna de Noailles, and Renée Vivien) gained visibility in French art song. One poet is particularly notable: Cécile Sauvage whose poetry was set both by her son, Olivier Messiaen, and by his wife, Claire Delbos. Patrons like Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, and Marie Vasnier proved equally as important to the genre as such professional musicians as Jane Bathori and Claire Croiza. In effect, salon and concert hall overlapped in repertoire and audience.

In this chapter, I explore three female folk song collectors: Lucy Broadwood, Annes Geddes Gilchrist and Dorothy Marshall, and three women from whom they collected songs – to provide wider commentary on the contributions of women to the first English folk song revival and their marginalization. In doing so, I examine the role of women in the first folk song revival, feminist practices in the archive, and a growing resurgence of interest in women and folk music. By exploring three examples of collecting in the first folk song revival, I illuminate the women who operated in the margins of the folk music movement and have since been marginalized by its history. I contend that by paying closer attention to what is found in the margins of manuscripts and other archival material, it is possible to glean information on the singing tradition, and collection practices, of women in the first folk song revival.

Richard Wagner’s pervasive influence on the French mélodie appears most openly in César Franck and his devoted students. Their chromatic language draws inspiration from the German composer, yet differs in significant ways, including a strong orientation toward subdominant harmony, as in Henri Duparc’s “L’invitation au voyage.” A survey of Franck’s songs leads to an exploration of the song cycles of Ernest Chausson and Guy Ropartz, which extend their teacher’s celebrated method of “cyclic composition.” Wagnerism intertwines with the hothouse aesthetic of Decadence in these fascinating mélodies, in which chromatic extravangance matches the precious refinement of poets like Maurice Maeterlinck and Jean Lahor.

This chapter examines Welsh-language Arthurian literature from c.1500 to the twentieth century, examining both prose and poetry and considering the fusion of the ‘native’ and the ‘non-native’ and questions of cultural continuity. References from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts are situated in a palimpsestic view of Britain, acknowledging the political realities of the present while also invoking a vision of the unconquered heroic ancestors of the Welsh. The shift from manuscript to print culture is followed, including a look at Arthurian literature in the burgeoning Welsh periodical press. It is suggested that twentieth-century reworkings of Arthurian traditions include romantic effusions as well as experimental modern explorations, all set within the context of textual articulations of Welsh national identity.

Gabriel Fauré composed over one hundred mélodies across his long career, but a curious change bifurcates his song oeuvre. From 1861 to 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed songs almost exclusively in cycles. While this cyclic turn occurs in other composers around 1890, Fauré’s cycles are far more integrated than those of Debussy, Chausson, or Poulenc, with unified narratives, and even networks of recurring leitmotifs. Fauré’s song cycles demonstrate an astute and imaginative response to the changing currents of French poetry, from the impassive formalism of the Parnassians to the critical rethinking of representation and authorship of the Symbolists. His last cycles, written after World War I, even show a clear orientation toward the objectivity of the emerging Neoclassical school of composition. Fauré’s individual songs will also retain their wonder, but it is the cycles that best reveal his thought.

Revival processes appear central to folk musics across different cultural and national traditions. Consequently, this chapter argues that, rather than perceiving revival as the exception, processes of revival and change should thus be perceived as a central feature of tradition. As is outlined here, revival needs to be approached from a much broader perspective. Falling back on case studies from England, Latvia, and Germany, this chapter further analyzes how acts of revival are entangled with themes of authenticity and nostalgia. Utilizing different claims of authenticity as elaborated by Denis Dutton, these waves of revivalism might be described as a defensive mechanism against eras of accelerated global change. Following scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Ross Cole, folk revivalism can thus be understood as an act of imaginative investment in the past and future, a nexus where nostalgia and utopia – as a counterpoint or solution to this sentiment of loss – meet.

This chapter discusses the renewed interest in the Arthurian matter in Europe in the nineteenth century with a focus on Germany, Spain, France and Italy. Tracing its reception from the Romantic period through to the emergence of modernism, we explore how the content,  values and aesthetic of Arthurian literature infused the cultural landscape. The form of reception ranges from the use of actual Arthurian material and chronotypes to the secondary influence exerted by the contemporary reception of Arthurian legend through Scott, Tennyson and later Wagner. The pattern of reception echoes that of earlier periods in its transnational character and, as the century progresses, it possible to see waves of interest with a ripple effect spreading out across Europe from Britain and the German-speaking lands as the material is incrementally absorbed into the contemporary cultural matrix of the Continent.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the field of emotion studies and surveys its contribution to the study of Arthurian literature. It then expands on the role of emotion – both as a critical category and as a narrative focus – in the development of the Arthurian canon, focusing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a late exemplar of the development of the courtly romance over time. Ultimately, it considers what emotions may tell us about the narrative intent and structures of the Middle English romance and, more broadly, what the study of Arthurian emotions has to offer to the field of emotion studies.