This chapter focuses on two contemporary horror ‘texts’ – the American HBO series Sharp Objects (2018) and the South African film Mlungu Wam (2022) – both of which gothicise the domestic sphere in ways that usefully focalise the manifold forms of exploitation and appropriation upon which global capitalism depends. By addressing their deployment of gothic to showcase how the world-system exploits the household, I hope to reframe traditional conceptions of the domestic gothic to illustrate the dependence of global capitalism on the unpaid work of nature’s metabolic energies and women’s social reproduction. In so doing, I argue for a new understanding of the domestic gothic through espousing a world-gothic method that not only productively opens the door for comparisons between gothic ‘texts’ from different regional locations in the same world-system but which also casts a searchlight on a series of intersecting exploitations that both hidden from view and typically thought of in isolation.

Commencing with the Welsh Peredur and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, this chapter traces the material dissemination of Grail romances across Northern Europe from the late twelfth century through to c.1550. Comparing and contrasting print and manuscript traditions from a book historical perspective, the geographical coverage includes France, England, Wales, Germany and the Low Countries, as well as Northern European territories into which Grail literature appears not to have entered, such as Sweden and Norway. In addition to setting out a clear chronology of Grail text dissemination and publication, the study shows how the proliferation (or not) of Grail book production over time offers insights into the cultural and sociopolitical contexts in which the literary motif of the Grail could be employed to greatest effect.

This chapter selectively draws on medieval and post-medieval Arthurian material to consider how, across time, children figure as the subjects of, and the audience for, Arthurian literature. Viewed in the context of medieval education, French romances use accounts of childhood and of enfances (knights’ youthful exploits) to explore ethical and narrative concerns, while some of their central tropes resurface in the Morte Darthur, which is relatively more diffident about childhood and youth per se, to illuminate important aspects of Malory’s art. The chapter outlines some of the culturally influential Anglophone Morte-inspired Arthuriads written for children from the nineteenth century onwards and Arthurian treatments in other child-focused texts, including fantasy writing, novels set in the fifteenth century and in Roman Britain, and Grail-inspired young adult fiction. Arthurian children’s literature, constituted by extraordinary conversations between writers across time and genre, cumulatively exemplifies the nature and creative power of Arthurian intertextuality.

This chapter surveys the history of Arthur, his court and his legacy in comics and gaming. While these media sometimes tell part or the whole story of Arthur, more often they produce sequels that borrow from the tradition or integrate Arthur into other fictional worlds (or both).

This chapter analyzes the role of multinational enterprises in driving both globalization and deglobalization waves historically. Emerging from industrialized Western economies, multinationals played a key role in expanding global capitalism after 1840 by transferring financial, organizational, and cultural assets across borders. They took various forms and proved highly resilient, withstanding shifts in policy regimes and often reinforcing rather than disrupting institutional and societal norms that restricted growth outside the West. Their ability, and motivation, to locate value-added activities in the most attractive locations means that they have often strengthened clustering and reinforced gaps in wealth and income. The most successful non-Western economies since the 1960s – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China – limited foreign multinationals or required technology transfers to local firms. Multinationals frequently contributed to global challenges rather than solving them, yet their overall impact was a complex mix of positive and negative factors.

This chapter reads images of capital’s bloodsucking thirst in works of Mozambican literature as an aesthetic registration of the destructive impact of capitalist extractivism upon the life and land of southern Africa. Focusing on Noémia de Sousa’s poem ‘Magaíça’ (1950) and Orlando Mendes’s novel Portagem (1966), it argues that writers have turned to spectral motifs and gothic devices as a figural means of coming to terms with the historical legacy of migrant labour in the political economy of colonial Mozambique. This cross-border economic system subordinated the interests of the Portuguese settlers to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation in neighbouring South Africa, at the same time as it ensured the continuing immiseration of the colonised population. Mobilising an aesthetics of vampirism and spectrality, Mozambican texts have limned a world-gothic critique both of the local history of semi-proletarisnisation in the country, and of the insertion of the region of southern Africa into the global circuits of (post-)colonial capitalism.

By 1230, with the Lancelot-Graal Cycle, the contours of the Arthurian universe and the chronology of events leading from the invention of the Grail to the disappearance of the emblematic king were given their first definitive form. However, in French, other medieval works continue to use the same characters and events to recount what happens after, before or elsewhere. With the Prose Tristan, the Cycle of Guiron le Courtois and Prophéties de Merlin, Arthurian prose romance enters a new phase, characterised by complex rewriting and a multiplication of versions and particular redactions. This chapter offers an assessment of the three works, taking into account the most recent critical debate.

The focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.

The emergence of vernacular French prose at the dawn of the thirteenth century gave rise to a new form of Arthurian romance. Prose allowed the development of lengthy cycles of interconnected romances that functioned autonomously while also forming an overarching story. The most popular of these cycles, the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, became the canonical version of the Arthurian narrative for the rest of the medieval period, influencing subsequent texts in the French-speaking world (Guiron le Courtois, the Prose Tristan, etc.) and beyond (the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, etc.). This chapter details the circumstances that made the Vulgate Cycle possible, its inner workings and dynamics, popularity, audience and legacy. It ends with a survey of the Post-Vulgate texts that were composed shortly after the initial cycle and examines the hypothesis of a ‘Post-Vulgate Cycle’ that may have connected them.

The twentieth century saw a considerable number of rewritings and adaptations of the Arthurian legend, in as many styles and purposes as there were writers, cultures and national heroes. Two main and sometimes paradoxical tendencies appeared: a quest for a supposedly deeper historical knowledge, and a need to popularise Arthurian themes. As Nazis launched their own quest for the Holy Grail, a subsequent need to re-enchant the world was expressed throughout the century. By adapting medieval texts to insist on their modernity for a contemporary readership, authors, artists and creators insisted on the universal aspects of the Matter of Britain, using it to emphasise the disillusionment in our modern Western societies, or on the contrary to expose the alleged wonders of an immutable human nature. The twentieth century confirmed this wide malleability, as Continental Europe regularly found in King Arthur a symbol of its own preoccupations.

This chapter examines various ways in which Arthur and Arthurian legend have been visualised between 1500 and 1800; not confined to manuscripts, it offers a cross-medium account of the legend’s visual representation, including physical installations, engravings, antiquarian juvenilia, as well as architecture and applied art. It examines the ways in which these visualisations present their narratives and how the figures are defined. This chapter also explores how Arthurian figures are identified and located within history, notably by devices including heraldry and architecture, and how these devices are employed to afford various senses of the antique, status and significance.

‘Bluebeard’ arrived in England not long after The Thousand and One Arabian Nights in theearly 1700s; and both ‘Bluebeard’ and the Arabian Nights came to England from the samesource: France. By the 1800s, ‘chapbook illustrations for ‘Bluebeard’ and for Arabian Nightswere literally interchangeable’ between the two (Hermansson 2009, 58) . These storiesexemplify the transnational origins of the gothic trope of woman as ‘dead’ in marriage(Wallace 2016) and that Arab women are ‘survival writers’. This chapter traces motifs fromthese conflated tales onto contemporary Arab women’s instances of ‘bloody chambers’ whichregister the world-system and revive other (supressed) women’s stories.

The chapter analyzes folk music and performance practices in a contemporary Indian and South Asian context. It covers the meaning and deployment of the term ‘folk’, its wider implications relating to caste, class, and taste, as well as its status in existing practices and scholarship. Whereas colonialists saw folk song as part of the enterprise to understand indigenous minds to better control and administer them, nationalists viewed it as a great resource to reconstruct the nation. After India’s independence, the state along with its middle class tried to institutionalize and appropriate folk song to cater to their tastes, however, it remained largely outside of their control and continues to maintain local and communitarian connections. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this chapter also addresses local hierarchies based on caste and cultural dispossession. Finally, it views folk song and music both as part of everyday life as well as a critique of everyday life that opens up an emancipatory discourse for the future.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.

The vast Prose Brut tradition, derived as it is from Galfridian pseudo-history, but with the continuations found in the Anglo-Norman, Latin and then Middle English chronicles, benefits from the integration of Arthurian pseudo-history and some elements of romance into the history of the ‘English nation’. It becomes the bestselling English history in the Middle Ages, attesting to the enormous popularity of Arthur’s reign not just among those interested in the chivalric ethos and courtly love, but in how the land was governed through the centuries. The Prose Brut was copied anonymously for the vast majority of the extant corpus across the three languages of medieval England, but even more importantly, was owned and read by a cross-section in society, enjoyed among the middle classes, and clearly produced, at least in part, commercially. It was one of the first texts printed by William Caxton and went through seventeen editions in the first few decades of the printing press in England.