The study of dialects in Britain and Ireland yields insight into the manner in which social forces affect the development of language. The history of English, outside of the trajectory which led to Southern Standard British English, shows a rich and varied tapestry of features, processes and interactions, which make this subject particularly rewarding in the context of an inclusive view of the language’s history. The identity function of local norms is apparent in all the studies of dialects in individual locations and ultimately accounts for the survival of local varieties despite the increasing pressure from supraregional forms of English represented in the educational system and very widely across the media landscape of modern Britain and Ireland. Looking beyond Britain and Ireland, factors that have influenced the English spoken in four small but significant locations in Europe (the Channel Islands, Malta, Cyprus and Gibraltar) are examined, revealing a rich interaction of colonial legacy, contact and national identity.

Hip-hop’s relationship to disability has been as long and complex as the culture itself. This chapter discusses the multiple ways that disabled artists and audience members have engaged, remixed, and transformed hip-hop through their work, activism, and building of communities. It considers prominent disabled hip-hop artists (like Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys), the presence of disability-specific aesthetics and imagery in subgenres like hyphy or “mumble rap,” and tenacious questions of ableism within the music (and the music industry), and it explores the work of disabled people outside the commercial music industry to expand and redefine the culture. Most specifically, it traces the development of Krip-Hop Nation, which emerged from linked movements for racial and disability justice to gain an international presence for disabled rap artists and fans.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

Chapter 6 discusses the distinction between sense and reference. The sense of a term is its general meaning as captured in the semantic properties of its dictionary definitions. This is what underlies generic and descriptive terms in trademark law. Unique identification of one particular entity requires some special and different “mapping” between language and the world: an “arbitrary” or “fanciful” link between e.g. APPLE and KODAK and their respective companies; a “suggestive” extension of ROACH MOTEL to its producer; or a “secondary meaning” for an otherwise descriptive term. The chapter argues, on the basis of grammatical and corpus evidence, that POST OFFICE is a generic term and not a source identifier for the US Postal Service. It analyses a set of trademarks involving ELASTIC, which are shown to make a clear and unique identification of the source company in question. Finally the difference between “referential” and “attributive” uses of definite descriptions is exemplified for THE POLICE in a dispute over who exactly was being accused of a certain crime.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

This chapter traces the transformative literary, scientific, and cultural events of the 1810s that shaped the period’s fascination with making life out of death. It was during this tumultuous decade that debates about materialism and vitalism came to a head. Literary and scientific writers alike boldly repositioned the human mind as dependent on the body. But this brought with it a host of anxieties. What kind of immortality can reside within the embodied mind, susceptible as it is to material dissolution? What kinds of fertility – intellectual and otherwise – can withstand mortality? For some writers in the 1810s, these questions may lead darkly, as in Frankenstein, to ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’; but for others, and especially for poets, that same grave becomes a site of regeneration. This chapter argues that the 1810s witnessed a form of Romantic decadence centred on the human body, one in which newly vocal philosophies of materialism combined with radical poetics to briefly reimagine and even celebrate the function of decay.

Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.

Much has been written about Maltese and its transformation into a language in its own right, both through external contact with other languages and due to internal factors. Less has been said about the English of Malta. In spite of regular criticism from purists, Maltese English has started to be regarded as a variety, distinct from others. This chapter examines the complex plurilinguistic context within which the variety has emerged and continues to flourish. It demonstrates how the socio-political context provided perfect conditions for the establishment of English as the de facto second language of Malta. Extensive use of English in different domains has also contributed to shaping the local variety in distinct ways to reflect the needs of the community (or subsets thereof) it serves. The chapter also outlines some of the more salient characteristics of the variety, in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, meaning and discourse.

This chapter explores some of the distinctive characteristics of English in Tyneside in relation to the socio-historical and sociolinguistic contexts in which they have emerged, evolved and in some cases declined. The main focus is on features of phonetics and phonology, but some consideration is also given to lexis, as a useful introduction to many of the historical influences that have played a part in moulding the dialect, and to aspects of grammar and discourse, which will be seen to reflect some of the same factors that have shaped the accent. In all of these areas, there is some loss of older, traditional forms, but the story is not just one of the increasing prevalence of supraregional variants; there are also more recent developments and current changes which are themselves distinctive and therefore help to maintain the individual character of Tyneside English.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.