Olivier Messiaen’s vocal music opens a new chapter for the mélodie. Both intimate and expansive, it unites the emotional scope of Wagner with a musical language derived from Debussy, using texts written by Messiaen himself. The present chapter considers the musical, poetic, and personal significance of each work, tracing their rapid evolution through the salon pieces Trois Mélodies (1930), the chamber cantata La Mort du Nombre (1930) and the major song cycles Poèmes pour Mi (1935), Chants de terre et de ciel (1938), and Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (1945). Epic in scope, with compelling narrative arcs, each cycle is more ambitious than the last, making exceptional demands of both soloist and pianist. We place each work within the context of Messiaen’s life, and analyse key musical techniques and influences such as plainchant, Indian râgas and Peruvian folksong. We also explore textual and thematic features such as Symbolist and Surrealist imagery, showing how the Catholic mysticism of these mélodies, which intertwine love and death in a yearning for transcendence, allows its cosmic drama to unfold.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

Folk music discourses have long held a complex relationship to colonialism. Definitions of colonialism – or the occupation and exploitation of one land by a dominant power – have usually been formulated through the voices of Western colonisers (or those educated within their intellectual traditions). Discourses on folk music have likewise shied away from post-colonial studies, reinforcing Victorian ideas of folk music as a natural art form that somehow exists separately from other, less static or rooted, musical ecosystems. This chapter explores the themes of (1) folk music as a post-colonial alternative to ‘cancel culture’, (2) folk music as a racialised category, and (3) strategies and possibilities for folk music’s decolonial futures. Focusing on British ideologies around the folk, I advocate for placing folk music into a critical dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous systems of knowledge that have the capacity to shift the power dynamics of these discussions away from racialized hierarchies.

This chapter offers a brief overview of patterns in approach, tone, theme and characterisation in North American engagements with the Arthurian legend since 1900. It considers retellings of the medieval romance and historiographic traditions alongside adaptations in multiple modes and media that are not especially interested in the earliest iterations of Arthur’s story. Paying particular attention to the perspectives from which these texts are told, the chapter considers how the diverse nature of these reimaginings challenges audiences to consider what exactly makes a text Arthurian while also acknowledging that the legend’s flexibility is central to its enduring popularity.

The seventeen French Arthurian romances in octosyllabic rhymed couplets considered in this chapter were written between the end of the twelfth century, or beginning of the thirteenth century, to the end of the fourteenth century, and with few exceptions are limited to northeastern France, Flanders and England. This chapter does not propose to study each of the seventeen romances, but to offer an overview, with the aim of situating them in a broad literary and cultural landscape. Textual culture will be the focus, seen as the meeting point between the text (romance) and manuscript, and between text typologies and typologies of text transmission.

This chapter argues that, in order to understand the association between protest song and the modern musical genre known as folk music, we need to contextualize it within a longue durée of protest song and popular politics. It does this by tracing the history of Anglophone and Germanic protest song from the later sixteenth century up to Bob Dylan’s 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, taking in labourers’ songs, the ballads of seventeenth-century revolutions, the anti-democratic theories of the ancient regime, the emergence of the idealised and self-aware labouring poet in the wake of the French Revolution, and the output of Chartists, Fabians,twentieth-century working-class movements and the Critics Group. These developments are placed within two contexts: the bottom-up struggle for a political voice, and the articulation of an ideology of Volk and folk. The result is to disrupt any implicit affinity between folk as a genre and political protest, introducing instead a more heterodox and responsive understanding of the evolving links between musical style, ideology, and a popular voice.

The composers of the mélodie were often highly literate. They met and befriended contemporary poets and set their work; some wrote verse themselves. This chapter briefly examines the traditional precepts of French versification and how they developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim is to offer an insight into how composers used their understanding of contemporary poetic practice to read the poems they set and to inform – or not – their musical responses. Topics covered in the chapter include: the differences between French and English versification; counting syllables and scanning the mute ‘e’; common French metres including the alexandrine; stanzaic structures including fixed forms such as the sonnet and rondel; rhyme degree, gender and alternation; the emergence of free verse and the prose poem. The discussion is illustrated by examples taken from song texts by a range of composers.

This chapter examines the relationship of global business and society by examining the historical role of multinational corporations in international market integration. After discussing how multinationals have played a role in integrating international markets since the nineteenth century, it focuses on multinationals and market integration in the European single market, in which multinationals both advocated for and navigated around dimensions of regional market integration. This chapter then considers the contexts of other regional trade agreements, including NAFTA, ASEAN to MERCOSUR/L. Finally, this chapter assesses the impact of multinationals and market integration on society and what backlash against both multinationals and trade frameworks reveals about the social consequences.

This chapter discusses the long Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin history of Britain, the De gestis Britonum (or Historia regum Britanniae). It sets Arthur in the context of Geoffrey’s focus on the strengths and weaknesses of a long line of British kings, starting with Brutus, the Trojan refugee who follows the goddess Diana’s prophecy to settle the island of Britain. The Britons are shown to be imperial and formidable, but also subject to internecine strife. British kings sometimes make disastrous decisions because of their own desires. Arthur is a paragon, a perfect king, and the narrative’s lingering over his reign and his victory over the Romans can make readers forget the larger pattern that governs Geoffrey’s history. But at the height of success, he is betrayed by his nephew, and while he wins his final battle, he is fatally wounded: all kings must, in the end, die.

Arthur emerges into history in the Historia Brittonum, written in North Wales in the ninth century. That is, though, a problematic work as regards establishing the ‘original’ text, its author’s purpose and its claim to historicity. Arthur’s inclusion as a ‘British’ hero who defeated the Saxons twelve times is compared to other war-leaders this author included, with attention drawn additionally to the geographical spread of these conflicts, likely borrowings from earlier works and the (probable) ‘Roman’ origin of the name. Overall, it is suggested that Arthur’s portrayal herein was, at best, heavily fictionalised. He emerges as a primarily literary figure, rather than historical, who was developed as a means of asserting the Britons had shown courage and military prowess, and received divine support, in their long struggle with the Anglo-Saxons, pushing back against their negative stereotyping in influential works by both Gildas and Bede, which were both still circulating.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.