This chapter explores world-gothic forms and figurations relating to the enclosure, extraction, and global distribution of oil in contemporary literary fiction from Denmark and Nigeria. Touching on key issues of visibility, vulnerability, and world-systemic interrelation, the chapter argues that gothic as a form of irrealism excels in revealing the bewildering experience of a lifeworld remade around fossil fuels. As fossil extraction is undeniably experienced in hugely unequal ways across the world-system, this chapter highlights the need for cross-hemispheric readings of contemporary petrofiction to identify and relate these differences in a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor – ‘Spider the Artist’ – along with two recent texts from Denmark that touch on offshore oil, namely Jesper Brygger’s collection of poems Transporterne (2017; The Transporters) and Gitte Broeng and Lasse Krog Møller’s very short monologue Mare (2023).

This chapter reconsiders the grotesque in the light of European sensibilities of transgression and abnormality. Querying to what extent the grotesque can challenge and unsettle modern and supposedly rational (European) sensibilities through its insistence on the overflow and unruliness of the body, the chapter starts out by a reading of the film Midsommar (2019). The chapter then proceeds to unearth the grotesque as an aesthetic term from its medieval and classical roots in order to perceive it in the light of a modernity that has attempted to regulate and eradicate premodern worldviews. From here, it examines the grotesque through a theoretical genealogy of Wolfgang Kayser, John Ruskin, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. It then engages in a reading of texts in light of both their national, regional and planetary contexts, such as Canadian David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1983, Dutch Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), and Argentinian Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2017). The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a global, environmental or planetary grotesque.

This chapter studies the historical evolution of the relationship between multinationals and dictatorial regimes. The chapter covers the first global economy (1860s–1930s), World War II, the Cold War (1948–1989), and the post–Cold War authoritarianism (1989–2010s) and shows that dictatorial regimes and foreign multinationals supported each other when the dictators’ political and economic agendas converged with the multinationals’ corporate goals. When these agendas stopped converging or if the multinationalss did not generate economic growth or political stability, the dictators were willing to violate existing contracts regardless of ideological affinities with the foreign investors. Moreover, multinationals were not passive actors in regime change processes that brought dictators to power, but actively promoted coups and legitimized post-coup dictatorial regimes when the previous democratic regime threatened their operations. The early twenty first century witnessed the rise of multinationals originating in dictatorial regimes, which adds a layer of complexity to these dynamics.

Folk music is irrevocably bound up with histories of racial thinking, from Atlantic slavery and the Middle Passage to W. E. B. Du Bois and beyond. In North America, Black folk music emerged as a vital expression of identity, resilience, and community amidst centuries of oppression. The most popular Black music sounds from spirituals and blues to rap music served as artistic outlets to retain African cultural continuances and navigate and resist racial discrimination, while also confronting colonial histories and the complexities of diasporic experience. This chapter illuminates how folk music reflects and shapes racial dynamics, offering insights into the broader cultural conversations surrounding race, identity, and resistance in North America and Britain. Further, it underscores the importance of understanding these musical traditions not just as artifacts of the past but as living expressions of ongoing struggles and resilience within Black communities.

This chapter presents an overview of the ways in which multinationals have been enmeshed with notions of imperialism in India. It outlines the significance of the English East India Company in shaping interpretations of multinational-related imperialism in India and the divergent perceptions and strategies of British and non-British multinationals in colonial India. Independent India’s tryst with multinationals and the perceptions of Indian multinationals since the mid twentieth century are also explored and the chapter shows the interconnections between multinationals and imperialism that can be valid for other regions as well.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of comparative analysis of the choice, placing and treatment of illustrations in the text. Here I list the eight surviving sets of the Lancelot-Grail made in the same cultural contexts. I analyse a pair of copies of the Estoire del saint Graal attributable to Metz in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century, comparing them with MS Royal 14 E.III, the most fully illustrated surviving copy. Both Metz manuscripts show special interest in the end of the story and the tomb of King Lancelot, ancestor of Lancelot du Lac, and one of them shows particular interest in depictions of the Grail.  Perhaps it was commissioned by a member of the clergy or by a devout lay person. In this period we have few names of patrons or makers and conclusions must be based on what is in each manuscript and the pictorial choices made there.

The first reliable accounts concerning King Arthur reached the Iberian peninsula in the twelfth century, but they did not become popular until the fourteenth century. From then on, the success of the texts was reflected in translations, retellings and imitations. The political particularities of the peninsula changed over time as the cultural references shifted from Al-Andalus to Castile: while in the early stages a classical tradition survived along with some Oriental influences from the Arabs, in the thirteenth century there was an increase in the French influence, which lasted into the fourteenth century and then gave way to the influence coming from Italy thanks to the expansion of the kingdom of Aragon in the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula (1508) revived the model.

This chapter provides an overview of the proliferation of Arthurian texts produced in North America, from an 1807 pamphlet to the poetry, drama, children’s literature and prose fiction of the turn of the century. It situates the legend’s development in Canada and the United States in relation to the Arthurian revival in England, specifically Tennyson’s poetry. In doing so, it identifies some of the common stories adapted (the Grail quest, the love triangles) and the different approaches of Canadian and American authors, whether claiming continuity with, or separation from, the English tradition. The chapter ends with analysis of the American Arthurian novel with the most lasting influence: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

The literary tradition where Arthur first appeared belongs to Welsh language, the immediate descendent of the Brittonic Celtic language spoken across most of the island of Britain before the subsequent arrivals of the Romans, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes,1 and the Normans. At the turn of the sixth century, which marks the moment associated with the Arthur of history, the landscape and cultural outlook of Wales and northern Britain offered an anchor to what were probably oral stories in circulation. The earliest surviving Welsh Arthurian poems and narratives furnished the essence and the pathways for the later transmission and adaptation of the legends into other languages and territories throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.2 The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture (henceforth CHALC) acknowledges the longue durée of Arthuriana, from the origins of the Arthurian story to an exploration of its impressive reach across medieval Europe, then into the global world.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

The chapter summarizes the way in which the history of the French language has shaped representations and conceptions of literature, and how it has shaped its musical settings. France has had a unique relationship with language, based on centralism, equipping itself with tools to make the French language a tool for standardizing and homogenizing the country. The French mélodie thus takes shape within a specific framework. The mélodie emerged in the crucible of Romanticism, which continually invented new forms and genres capable of reflecting the new sensitivity of the individual. With Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été to poems by Théophile Gautier, the mélodie escaped drama, pathos, and narration. Thereafter, it retained this characteristic of paying attention, first and foremost, to language and poetic text.

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.