This chapter discusses a multiplicity of Arthurs, all mirroring the complexity of contemporary Africa and the Middle East. Arthur is a familiar presence here in advertisements, video games, children’s books and popular films, but he is rarely found elsewhere. Interestingly, both Chaka and Saladin are sometimes positioned as local counters to Arthur, but later Arthurian references are more likely to be comic or satirical, except for allusions to the Grail legend. References to the latter are characteristic of Nashid Uruk, for instance, and it has been argued that Doris Lessing’s work also reveals a sustained pattern of Grail imagery. Other representations of Arthur are almost entirely negative, linking him to autocratic rule, class elitism, gender imbalance and armed violence; however, awareness of Sir Moriaen, the Moorish knight, seems to be resurging and this may at last allow the tales to move out of the oppressive shadow cast by European imperialism.

Anxieties around stable and unified human subjectivity, and the related emergence of a transformative or transformed abhuman, are central to gothic criticism. However, this approach takes the European male, universalised through Enlightenment humanism, as its normative subject, with (some) women, colonised others, and non-human nature as, therefore, abhuman and the epitome of the abject. This fcritiques the primitivist underpinnings of European constructions of the human, abject and the abhuman, and exposes plural modes of being evident in a world-gothic analysis of The Icarus Girl (Oyeyemi) and Freshwater (Emezi).

Due to the national seclusion policy (1639–1854), the Japanese came to know Arthurian works at the end of the nineteenth century; and such sudden contact led to a peculiar reception of the legend.  This chapter investigates how Japanese people have enjoyed Arthurian works roughly in three periods: around 1900, when non-medieval European materials by Alfred Tennyson, Wilhelm Richard Wagner and Joseph Bédier were popular; during the twentieth century, when American authors such as Thomas Bulfinch and Mark Twain became influential; and in the twenty-first century, when female King Arthurs prevail because of a Japanese game series entitled Fate.  As a result, Excalibur and other Arthurian motifs are ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture these days, via games, comic books, juvenile novels and stage performances.

This chapter explores the sociopolitical significance of folk instruments, positing them as vital embodiments of cultural identity and history. Through a series of case studies (primarily, the banjo and the Appalachian dulcimer), the chapter illuminates the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation, revealing how folk instruments are not simply static objects but actively evolving symbols of resilience and cultural memory. Through a critique of traditional taxonomies that often marginalize these instruments, the chapter advocates for a more inclusive framework that recognizes and centres the agency of makers and users. Further, by applying a postcolonial lens, it highlights the importance of embodied aesthetics and the complexities of musical practices within folk traditions. Drawing on the work of Kofi Agawu, it explores both the manufacture of instruments as well as their varied use patterns over time and geographical space. Finally, it situates folk instruments in relation to archies and processes of canonization.

Middle Dutch Arthurian romances often are translated from French sources, yet Flemish and Dutch poets also created their own Arthurian tales. What do these ‘Dutch originals’ contribute to European Arthuriana? They may, with a modern term, be seen as ‘speculative fiction’, exploring new and unexpected narrative possibilities. The source issue of the Torec romance and its meaning for the French tradition is discussed first, followed by an explanation of what speculative fiction entails. Three examples then demonstrate the ‘What if…?’ nature of the Middle Dutch Arthurian tales: (1) the threefold, rather than single, quest in the Roman van Walewein, (2) the appearance of, and reactions to, a black-skinned knight in the Arthurian setting (Moriaen), and (3) the experiment of creating a cyclic narrative from different kinds of romances (originating in prose and verse), with special attention to the development of the (emotional) self of main characters like Lancelot and Gawain in the consecutive stories of the cycle.

This chapter explores the cultural obsession with entropy in the London-based magazine, New Worlds. Associated with the 1960s New Wave, New Worlds was instrumental in bringing an experimental literary sensibility to the genre of science fiction. Writing against the grain of prevailing academic criticism, the chapter unearths a latent utopian impulse within the metaphor of entropy. Artists, writers, and critics associated with New Worlds considered the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, to be a fitting image for the dystopian mood of post-war British literature and culture. The chapter argues that their obsession with the disintegration of society at a time of post-imperial decline reveals, rather, hope among the ruins. It offers a close reading of British-based artist and writer Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which the boredom of a Californian housewife stretches into a Dadaist utopian daydream about the heat death of the universe, the theoretical endpoint of entropy. By situating fictions published in New Worlds within the wider political contexts of anti-colonial resistance, the New Left, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation, the chapter uncovers a persistent strain of utopian possibility through Britain’s cultural obsession with entropy in the 1960s.

This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This chapter considers what kind of utopian articulations can be glimpsed in contemporary British experimental poetry. Three experimental poets writing in the 2010s are analysed in detail: Sean Bonney, Verity Spott, and Callie Gardner. The chapter situates these poets within the British experimental poetry scene, tracing an ecosystem of small-scale independent publishing. DIY poetry magazines such as Zarf (produced in Cardiff, Leeds, and Glasgow) and presses such as the87press, Aquifer, DATABLEED, Sad Press, and many others operated outside of formalised spheres of paid labour. In the 2010s, communities of British poets, publishers, audiences, and readers sustained themselves through a non-commercial ethos of gift exchange. This ethos was explicitly utopian in its attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism through non-alienated economic and social structures. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s utopian theorisation of the 1960s counterculture feels relevant to this moment in the British experimental poetry scene, the chapter explores how many of these poets expressed scepticism about the form’s inherent political potential. For them, politics, rather than aesthetics, contained the germs of utopian possibility. Their experimental works offer precursors to a futurity that is not yet here, but the arrival of which is necessary for the survival of progressive politics.