Tennyson’s Idylls, so popular a subject of illustration in the Victorian era, have not been the subject of much illustration in the last hundred years – though a number of illustrated editions of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ have appeared in that period. Nevertheless, illustrations of the Idylls influenced a spate of illustrated editions, retellings or adaptations of Malory’s Morte, the book that inspired most of the Arthurian illustrations in the last century, and of other major works, especially of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Though sanitised in popular gothic television across the late-twentieth century, the figure of the witch has since the early modern period been connected to gendered forms of capitalist violence, functioning as a tool for (literally) domesticating women both in Europe and the colonies at moments when existing organisations of labour are restructured. At the same time, witchcraft (a contested term) has also been a cultural site of gendered and epistemic resistance, where anti-patriarchal practices intersect with the reclamation of non-Eurocentric cosmologies. This chapter examines these different dimensions of the witch, incorporating a range of regional and cultural perspectives.

This chapter explores the folk and traditional music of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales – the so-called Celtic regions of the British Isles – in terms of the concepts and processes through which such music is made, representing both the everyday and the elite, past and present; modalities, in short, that I feel represent a timeless importance to our aesthetic understanding and a foundation for negotiating traditional music’s social and historical value today. Threading loosely through my exploration of these modalities is what ethnomusicologist Constantin Brăiloiu called ‘the problem of creation’, which serves as a useful lens through which I remark on the making of traditional music as a complex interplay of function, acquisition, structure, symmetry, orality, improvisation, variation, literacy, and memory. I present these modalities chiefly through the prism of Scottish music owing to its significance in the historical discourse surrounding our very concept of the folk.

In this chapter Angeline Morrison offers an exquisitely written account of what mythopoeic singing means to her and why it is central to reimagining the history of British folk music. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, she highlights the transformative power of song. Disembodied, imaginal, or non-physical things, she argues, can be sung into being. This process can serve the cause of decolonization by engaging in a form of contemporary mythmaking that re-enchants and re-populates historical landscapes with figures known to have been present, but who may not be identifiable in the body of song that survives.

he route “from Romance to Mélodie” is used to imply a significant development in French “art song”, from simplicity to a sophistication equivalent to the German Lied. There is, however, no simple replacement of one by the other: the genres, in so far as they are distinct at all, actually overlap. Works titled “Romance” by Martini, Niedermeyer, Monpou, and Berlioz could be considered as mélodies avant la lettre. The word appears prominently in Berlioz’s published collection, the Mélodies irlandaises (1830). He had already shown a predisposition for variation in settings that, like Romances, are essentially strophic, and this tendency continued, for instance in “Villanelle”, the first song in Les Nuits d’été. Through-composed compositions appear among his earliest published songs, in the 1830 set, and in Les Nuits d’été which, although composed for voice and piano, has some claim to be considered the first orchestral song-cycle.

Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility; not only a literature of the transportive and ephemeral nature of love, but also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. These networks provided an understructure for the Arthurian corpus, one that reinforced an appetite for global luxury goods and that fuelled an economy of pleasure. While narrating the physical mobility of knights and the emotional mobility of the desire for, attainment and loss of love, Arthurian romance also celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages. The acquisition and ephemerality of material objects and literary motifs from diverse cultures links the local and imaginative spaces of Arthurian narratives with global commerce.

This chapter explores how multinationals have collectively defended their interests by actively participating in clubs and associations at both national and international levels. It highlights how multinationals pragmatically adapted their political strategies to sustain global operations, from the age of empires in the nineteenth century through the collapse of the first globalization, World War II, decolonization, the second globalization, and the resurgence of economic nationalism after the 2010s. Political challenges, including wars and pressures from governments and international organizations—such as the 1970s attempts to regulate multinationals —were key drivers of their political activism. The chapter examines the broader societal impacts of these efforts, including the consolidation of business influence in host and home economies, the global diffusion of standards, the institutionalization of regulations that facilitated and protected international investment, and tax reductions, particularly through the elimination of double taxation.

This chapter covers fifty-seven mélodies, roughly two-thirds of Debussy’s total output in this genre. It reviews the composer’s initial eclectic poetic choices and reveals the influences that guided his path toward a Symbolist aesthetic. In his quest to formulate musical analogues for Symbolist ideals, by responding to the structures, rhythms, and basic affect of the poems he set, Debussy developed his own unique compositional vocabulary and technique. Analytical investigations of three emblematic songs—“Caprice” (Banville), from 1880; the “Clair de lune” (Verlaine) settings from 1882 and 1891; and “Spleen” (Verlaine), from 1888—demonstrate how Debussy’s approach to text setting evolved and how this process ultimately led to his artistic maturity. Characteristic compositional features observable in these three songs may be extrapolated to many of his other mélodies and even to his instrumental works.

This chapter demonstrates that multinationals have been major contributors to environmental challenges. Before 1960 multinationals were clustered in natural resources and in developing countries, where they contributed to deforestation, poisoning soil and water systems, and the creation of monocultures resulting in biodiversity loss. Oil companies were a driver of climate change because of the industry’s role in greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile the spread of consumer goods multinationals encouraged conspicuous consumption and wasteful packaging. After 1960 rising environmental awareness and government regulations in the West led some multinationals to adopt sustainability policies, yet major oil companies deliberately obscured climate science to delay regulation. After 2000 many multinationals engaged in greenwashing while continuing harmful practices. Despite corporate commitments, shareholder value maximization often overrode genuine environmental responsibility. Environmental damage committed by multinationals continued, especially in countries where regulation and enforcement were fragile.

While Arthur functioned as a point of reference and a hero to be emulated in early medieval Welsh texts, the rise in interest in utilising King Arthur and the values he stood for in visibly political ways becomes evident in the period following the twelfth century. Appropriations of the symbolism from Arthurian stories ranged from objects, performances, ceremonies, events (such as Arthurian-themed tournaments and pageants) and displays. This chapter interrogates the social and political uses of these varied instances of Arthurianism, linking them, where possible, to their Arthurian literary sources. It aims to show, selectively, the breadth of inspiration drawn from Arthurian legends across Europe for daily life, particularly among those who had urgent and real benefits to reap from association with the legendary king.

In this chapter, Jon Boden of the band Bellowhead confronts a pervasive element of folk performance that affects reception and yet often escapes notice: spoken introductions. He points out that as a conversational and informal art, folk music shares much with humour. Introductions, he argues, can serve several important purposes, including framing narratives, providing historical context, distancing, and offering a partisan viewpoint. Folk performers often have to balance an audience’s desire for a sense of personal accessibility and communality with the equally necessary demands of entertainment professionalism.

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.