When considering the relationship of comics to social justice, textual meaning can be understood in two interconnected ways. First, new comics contribute to an ongoing tradition of graphic narratives reaching back over a century, documenting and supporting normative views of dominant groups, revolutionary social change from the margins, and everything in between. Second, their authors and readers engage with comics as formally malleable multimodal texts with unique affordances for representation. Given their communicative capacity through both content and form, comics’ ability to address representational injustice and other oppression that can lead to trauma requires that we effectively understand what as well as how they communicate.

To investigate the complexity of this interplay and how it relates to injustice and trauma, this chapter considers how Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940–75) samples comics in his Popliteratur work. In two poetry volumes created in dialogue with 1960s American counterculture, Die Piloten (The Pilots, 1968) and ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene (ACID: New American Scene, 1969), Brinkmann samples comics for his aesthetic goals—to interrupt normativity and preclude any attempt at literary analysis. This chapter focuses on the playful form and countercultural con tent—sampled from the American Beat and hippie movements—in the comics Brinkmann selects. It considers how their formal innovations ultimately fail to undermine certain content norms, specifically heteronormativity and hypermasculinity. Thus, through the results of considering their multimodal form and content separately, I point to the shortcomings in Brinkmann's project of using samples to break norms and—by extension—promote social justice.

The reign of James VII/II marked a unique moment for Catholic print in the seventeenth century. For the first time since Mary Tudor, overtly Catholic texts were sanctioned by the crown. This change is encapsulated in a pastoral letter from the Catholic Vicars Apostolic speaking about the role of Jesuits: ‘the exercise of it hath been private and precarious, tending rather towards the Preservation of it in yourselves, than a Propagation of it to others. But now you are in circumstances of letting it appear abroad’. Catholic print was now permitted and publicly advertised. Thomas Clancy's bibliography recorded a major increase in new editions of English Catholic books from 80 between 1681 and 1685 to 356 between 1686 and 1688, showing an enthusiastic response to this change in circumstances. To bring about this tidal wave of texts, the king bypassed parliament to patronise Catholic print through a series of dispensations derived from his royal prerogative. However, James did not immediately turn to pre-existing print networks; instead, he created a new structure with new players that he superimposed onto the market and onto existing networks. Analysing this at the end of a long study of Restoration Catholic print culture highlights the ways in which the print trade under James deviated from previous patterns. Many older networks found a way to incorporate themselves into this new system, and others still eventually joined. Nevertheless, it was a system shaped by the king and was far more religiously homogeneous than those of previous decades.

Alain Mabanckou's Blue White Red explores the circumstances that necessitate the flight of the protagonist from the Republic of Congo and his subsequent disillusionment when confronted with the realities of illegal immigration in France. Mabanckou uses irony and satire to condemn the greed and avarice that lure illegal migrants to Europe and exposes the ignorance and gullibility of African societies. In the examination of the life of the narrator in Paris, Mabanckou sends a clear message to Africans contemplating departure about the dangers of illegal migration.

At the opening of the novel, the narrator is in solitary confinement. The narrator, unnamed at this point in the story, is reflecting on his past and tells us of the psychological torture of being in detention awaiting deportation. Using memory as a structural device of plot construction, the author depicts the precarious lives of illegal African migrants in Paris. Further, in the narrative, he references numerous and continuous raids by both the police and immigration officers and the arbitrary arrests and detention of undocumented migrants in unsanitary facilities.

The voice of the unnamed narrator is personal, introspective, and reflective. Its subdued tone registers the honesty with which he assesses his situation in the context of the deep psychological struggle he is going through to make sense of his location. He reflects on the decision to migrate to France and questions the moral rightness of flight, even with the best of intentions. His mood shifts from justification to lamentation. Finding himself in this space between resignation and hope, the voice hints at the motivation for continued struggle despite the odds.

Patriotism was an essential but geo-politically and historically nuanced key concept in public debates across Enlightenment Europe in the eighteenth century. German historian Rudolf Vierhaus's dual division of patriotism is useful as a point of departure for a contextual and transnational comparison of the modalities of patriotism; enlightened patriotism and historical-estatist patriotism represent opposite ends of the spectrum of eighteenth-century patriotism. One important facet of patriotism that Vierhaus identifies covers the commitment to serve the public good, be it within the institutions of the state, or the court, or outside (the public sphere, polite sociability, patriotic societies). This moderate patriotism was driven by values of progress, improvement, and education. Sites of ‘microscopic or little enlightenments’ were not only situated, as Teodora Shek Brnardić suggests, in the public sphere, that is patriotic societies, but also, as dynastic/estatist variants, in small and regional courts. Whilst Wolfgang Martens identifies the shift in emphasis from the classical understanding of political patriotism (patriot as citizen) to an ‘apolitical patriotism’ that appealed to the apolitical Gemeinsinn [public spirit] in the eighteenth century, I would argue that the enlightened reform patriotism is indeed political. Though it does not necessarily elevate the patriot to a citizen (in a republican sense), it demands of the patriot political acts of reform and improvement. Furthermore, the patriot is simultaneously committed to the local and regional [Landespatriotismus], and to the global – the enlightened patriot is patriotic as he or she is a citizen of the world.

The trade of interlacustrine Africa with other regions had a long history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, contacts of the region with other parts of Africa and the world extended dramatically when it became a destination and intersection of two trading networks. The East African caravan trade, which connected the mainland with Zanzibar as an entrepôt to global markets, reached interlacustrine Africa in the late eighteenth century. In the interior, Kazeh (or Tabora), 250 km south of Lake Victoria, became a major trading centre in the 1840s. Some years later, the trade with the East African coast was an integral part of the economy of kingdoms like Buganda and Karagwe. Another trading network linked the region with the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. This network used the Nile as its main trading route with Khartoum as its most important gateway for the trade with the south. In the 1870s the two trading networks met at the border between Bunyoro and Buganda where traders from the East African coast exchanged ivory for cattle with traders from Khartoum.

The arrival of traders from outside the region was a challenge and a chance for interlacustrine rulers. This chapter has two main arguments. First, although individual interlacustrine societies reacted to these challenges in various ways, there was often an important regional aspect in these reactions, too. For centuries, interlacustrine rulers had fought for hegemony in the region, for the access to trade routes, natural resources, and production centres.

Chapter 1 explored motherhood in a space that was specifically female-coded, and came to the conclusion that romance texts advocated for the retention of that women-only space as essential for the act of childbirth and early motherhood. This chapter analyses representations of motherhood in a space that is open to men and women but in which men hold authority. In showing mothers interceding and negotiating within the castle and its vicinity, romance texts explore the power and contributions of women in patriarchal spaces that seek to either exclude or limit their authority. The words and actions of mothers change the power dynamics and gendered hierarchies of these spaces. In these texts, mothers intercede in public spaces when the actions of men have failed them or when that space itself is at risk from masculine deeds. Maternal characters in public spaces in the late fourteenth-century texts Athelston, Sir Degrevant, and the Roman de Melusine use the strengths of their role to compete with men's authority, illuminating how romance recognises and subverts certain concepts of gendered space. These texts present female authority derived from different aspects of motherhood, such as pregnancy and experienced caregiving, in negotiation with masculine authority in more public settings: halls, streets, and besieged castles. The outcome of mothers asserting their authority within these spaces varies, showing that how mothers interact with public space is as nuanced as the romance genre's portrayal of women themselves.

Katikiro and their various incarnations like enganzi or enfura had shaped the diplomacy of interlacustrine Africa for most of the nineteenth century. It was they who received the incoming foreigners like traders, explorers and missionaries. Profit from these contacts these men obviously did. Therefore, they were not only intermediaries in the world of diplomacy, who acted on the behalf of their rulers, but brokers in their own right. Having managed contacts with the Europeans for many years, they knew how to handle them, how to manipulate them. They had done so very successfully in previous times. When those Europeans turned into agents of colonial powers in the region, they saw them not so much as a threat, but a chance. Europeans on their side regarded them as men they could trust or at least as familiar contacts. It is therefore not surprising that this group played a decisive role in the establishment of colonial rule.

This chapter makes several arguments. First, the diplomacy of the establishment of colonial rule was characterised on the African side by conflicts between different groups of elites. The interests of the katikiro were often not congruent with those of their kings. By looking at these conflicts we learn a lot how interlacustrine societies perceived the political change that came with colonial rule and how they tried to manage and profit from them. There were clearly losers and winners in this process and, generally, those who were able to manage the communications between African societies and colonial agents belonged to the latter.

This book has sought to reveal the dynamics of church-raiding by Vikings in Ireland, and to relate this to other aspects of their objectives, in particular, their political ambitions. It has been possible to present a more reliable analysis than heretofore of Viking church-raiding, over the two centuries when its practice or absence is an indicator of their priorities and achievements in Ireland. The perspective in Part I of the book is predominantly a methodological one. The case was made that a rigorous quantitative analysis of the annals is an essential prerequisite for valid general statements about the basic facts of Viking church-raiding: its development over time, geographical distribution, immediate purpose, and the broader context, which is, primarily, Viking engagement with Gaelic Irish kingdoms, great and small. Establishing these basic facts was not as straightforward as the work of previous writers would lead one to imagine. Since the annals comprise the essential source, it became clear that the precise value and precise limitations of that source must first be grasped if it is to be used to generate substantial conclusions. Appreciating clearly and in detail patterns in the general reportage of the annalists – chronological and geographical patterns and changes in reporting conventions and in the matters that were of interest to the chroniclers – allowed properly weighted conclusions to be drawn about the specific subject matter of Viking church-raiding. Real features and trends in the practice of Viking raiding were quantified, as precisely as they could be, because, as a necessary control, patterns of annalistic recording generally were thoroughly delineated. I hope it will be agreed that the approach adopted here is also of broader value.

Five years after the publication of Der Stechlin and an ocean away, naturalist John Burroughs kicked off what came to be known as the “Nature Fakers” controversy with his essay “Real and Sham Natural History” in the March 1903 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Burroughs's essay was an attack on authors like Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long, who depicted non-human life in an allegedly sentimentalized and anthropomorphized way, while boldly asserting the truth of their depictions, profiting, so Burroughs's allegation goes, off of a public taste for non-realism, “the popular love for the sensational and improbable.” Burroughs's objection is that the sensational and improbable are signs that the Nature Fakers are, in fact, attempting to pass off fictional accounts as non-fictional “nature writing,” the “sham natural history” of the essay's title. Seton and Long, of course, understood themselves to be appealing to something else in their intended audiences, namely a desire to overcome a sense of disenchantment and alienation from nature that industrial and scientific culture had brought about. Long makes the connection explicit in the opening chapter of A Little Brother to the Bear when he says that the theories of evolution and of gravity occupy “the same comfortable category” as such phenomena of industrial culture as the telegraph and the steam engine. Not incidentally, the “conquest of nature” in this instance is not simply a question of the proliferation of the trappings of industrial technology or the demythologizing effects of modern science, but in Long's American context is directly connected to the history of displacement and attempted extermination of Native American peoples.

The Therapeutica of Alexander of Tralles, or, more specifically the seventh- century Latin translation of it, is closely related to the other texts discussed in this book both by its reception in the Old English medical corpus and by its transmission in the Continental record alongside either the Latin Oribasius or the ensemble of texts which grew around the Galen's Ad Glauconem. In the previous two chapters, the name Alexander Trallianus, or Alexander of Tralles, has occurred many times. His book on gout forms part of the Ad Glauconem ensemble, as discussed in Chapter 4, while his complete works were transmitted, from a presumed insular archetype, alongside the Latin Oribasius in a ninth-century manuscript now BnF MS Lat. 9332 as discussed in Chapter 5. Alexander probably lived in Rome, most likely being a rough contemporary of Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604), meaning that he was living at the time that Latin literary culture was being reintroduced into England.

This chapter considers the reception of Alexander as that of one of the leading innovators in late antique medical theory and practice, and will therefore examine the ways in which Alexander's ideas were used in conjunction with those of previous medical authorities in the Old English synthesis of these works. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Old English reception of Alexander is intertwined with the reception of Oribasius, and it can be difficult to precisely distinguish one authority from the other once they have been subject to the form of paraphrasing, rearranging, augmentation and omission which occurs in ancient and medieval translation practice.

To say that the absence of the Olympians in the Bellum Civile has excited considerable scholarly debate is an understatement. Unlike the gods in the epics of Homer, Vergil, or indeed Lucan's successor Statius, Lucan's Olympians never appear as direct actors in or instigators of the events of his poem. There are no councils of the gods, almost no divine visitations, and what prophecies mortals do solicit are through human intermediaries. Lucan's narrator periodically (and often contradictorily) comments on the role of fate (fatum), Fortuna, and the gods, but ultimately such questions are left deliberately ambiguous and impenetrable both to the text's characters and to the work's audience. Given such a startling absence in Lucan compared to other Classical Latin epics, this chapter will question how the translators and redactors of In Cath Catharda reimagined the role of fate and the gods, situating them within the framework of Christian salvation history. As neither Lucan's Bellum Civile nor its Irish adaptation include Classical deities in active roles, this case study will be better able to elucidate the historiographical foundations supporting medieval Irish readings of Classical literature and myth.

In Cath Catharda emerges as far more interested in constructing a coherent picture of fate and Fortuna than Lucan's Bellum Civile and positions its narrative in an eschatological light; that is, as a text concerned with endings and apocalypses, both Classical and biblical.

2nd Military Suite in F minor

Holst composed his 2nd Military Suite in F minor, the first version of his Second Suite in F for Military Band, in 1911.1 Reasons for his composing this work at this particular time remain unknown, although one probably would not be out of line in speculating that Holst wrote the work (a) in general—as a response to the constant plea for original military band works from established British composers and (b) in particular—as a result of his contacts with personnel at the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. It is also possible but not probable that, as in the case of his other 1910–1911 military band works, he composed it for the Festival of Empire. If it were, it probably would not have been composed for the Festival of Empire Military Band, since the instrumentation of that group was larger than that listed on his manuscript full score. Yet another possibility is that Holst, who was not immune from entering contests, composed it for the 1911 competition held by the Worshipful Company of Musicians.2

Although composed only two years after the First Suite in E-flat for Military Band, the 2nd Military Suite in F minor is more economically scored than its predecessor. There are no allowances for optional instrumentation here. Gone are the E-flat trumpets, B-flat trumpets, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, and timpani, for this work was originally scored for the standard British regimental band instrumentation of thirty to thirty-five players used during the first two decades of the twentieth century