People's desire for playfulness is aroused by the use of advanced technology. Playfulness has played different roles across the ages. Cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1998) expands the concept of play into a more general picture, which includes the process of human evolution and cultural practice. He believes that playfulness is a fundamental function of human beings and their culture; in fact, it is its origin (Huizinga, 1998, as cited in Nielsen, 2009). However, playfulness seemed to weaken during the industrial epoch. Max Weber (1946) diagnoses the industrial age as one that is disenchanted with the world, where playfulness was separated from work, and people were not inclined to play anymore. More recently, some scholars suggest that the desire for playfulness seems to have returned, whereby Homo sapiens are once more Homo ludens (Jeon & Fishwick, 2017). With the affordance of digital technology, people use their smartphones for hunting monsters in their gardens (e.g. Pokémon Go, an AR mobile game) and children use controllers to paint in 3D space (e.g. Tilt Brush, a VR painting application). Playfulness seems to be an inseparable part of human beings. As Huizinga (1998, p. 3) notes, ‘You can deny seriousness, but not play’.

In this chapter, I draw on the concept of playfulness (play) to consider viewers’ illusionary experience of digital immersive art and question the authenticity of digital immersive art through the ambivalence of viewers’ perception of Chinese culture in terms of real artefacts and virtual works of art. In focus group discussions of the three case studies that I introduced in the previous chapter, viewers considered the VR experience to be game-like. Sometimes this game-like experience contradicts the perception of cultural presence. Playfulness, as an element of cultural practice, also has connections with illusion. Since the eighteenth century, playfulness has continually been defined by illusion (Scheuerl, 1997); ‘being at play […] means stepping into the imaginary sphere for a specific time without fully surrendering to it’ (2009). The famous hypothesis by aesthetician Friedrich Schiller (2004) even goes so far as to propose that art originated from playfulness.

Eighteenth-century explorers and settler colonials in Appalachia encountered massive old-growth forests and as early as 1742 discovered coal deposits alongside a river in West Virginia, marking the beginning of a highly covetous or vampiric approach to the region's natural resources that has shaped Appalachia ever since. From deforestation to deep coal mining, and from mountaintop removal (MTR) to fracking, time and again an extractive logic has been applied to the region, a logic defined by profit margins and callous disregard for the health of the environment and local communities.

All too often when outsiders think of Appalachia, they struggle to see beyond stereotypes to acknowledge the costs of fossil fuel extraction. Instead, and by a cynical sleight of hand, rural Appalachia and its people are viewed as a foreboding threat, which neatly serves to deflect from the real horrors of extraction. Such misapprehensions are tightly woven into the popular imagination because it is more comforting to accept that rural Appalachians are gun-toting, toothless terrors, than it is to expose and recognize the real monster in the room. That monster, of course, is generated by extraction. In his work specifically on rural horror in Appalachia, McClanahan asks, “What if the horrifying reality of the rural is a result of the ways that those landscapes and people have been exploited and harmed by human activity and capital?” For McClanahan, extraction wreaks havoc and devastation on both people and the environment, therefore across Appalachian literature extraction and the gothic are symbiotic, resulting in a body of work that writes back against fossil fuel extractivism, exposing its horrors and inequity.

Indeed, in her work on extraction and British literature, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues that “literary form and genre produce and extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding because of the deep and durational qualities of discourse.” It is, she suggests, the “durational qualities of lan-guage, genre, and form” that ensures “literature engages with environmental materiality across time, and for this reason it is a crucial archive for understanding the relation between environmental history and environmental crises today.”

Geographic location is a vital component in British Gothic literature, and the location of Gothic fiction has been of perennial interest among critics. If one looks at the Gothic locations chosen by British writers, including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and a host of imitative Minerva Press novelists, Southern Europe was a popular setting. From a British Protestant perspective, the perception of Catholicism was adversarial, shaped by the cultural, religious, and political climate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cannon Schmitt has coined the term ‘alien nation’ to describe Gothic texts that establish a location culturally opposite to the writer's position, helping to conceptualise a sense of national identity. Further afield in fictional space, William Beckford's Islamic Arabo-Persian setting in Vathek (1786) capitalises on the British fascination with Oriental settings. We may observe how the legends and mythology associated with these places are made vehicles of terror and the supernatural. However, it would be a critical cliché to confine the genre to just fantasised regions abroad; English and Scottish locations are also found in the early Gothic novels of Clara Reeve and James Hogg. Within these locales, one can observe that Gothic narratives are often intertwined with local legends and tales related to the setting. To borrow a formulation from Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy about Gothic texts, it is a discernible tendency that ‘space characteristically becomes historicised and history becomes spatialised’.

The focus of this book is on Nordic culture and its association with Anglophone Gothic texts. A key argument I will present is that the familiar concept of the Gothic ‘Other’ becomes difficult to uphold in relation to Nordic terror. This is because writers saw the Nordic tradition as a part of their own cultural and ethnic history. Nordic pagan religion and folklore were seen not only to preserve cultural elements of a broader Germanic ethnic heritage but also to represent a direct lineage to the British past, as Scandinavians were known to have settled in Britain. I propose that British writers tackled the depiction of Nordic terrors as an element in a complex discussion about their historical heritage and the part it played in shaping the contemporary nation.

Appalachia has played a critical role in the growth and progress of the national economy, but its gothic literature demands pause, time to question the costs of a relentless pursuit of growth, from the forced removal of Indigenous people to slavery, and from coal mining to the climate crisis. Of course, the climate crisis is arguably the most existential threat, and pushing beyond the term Anthropocene, Botting coins the term “Monstrocene” to encompass the human and non-human terrors and horrors of the climate crisis. Yet Botting cautions against the pitfalls of dark ecology and a tendency to frame the climate crisis in purely monstrous terms, concerned that climate monsters may “only serve to horrify and paralyze all thought, all imagination, all response.” However, in a region rendered monstrous in the popular imagination, Appalachian authors must turn to the monstrous, not to “paralyze,” but to expose the monster for what it really is and in the case of the climate crisis, the monster is partly formed by the waves of fossil fuel extraction that have wreaked destruction across the region.

The critical reflections on an extractive logic across Appalachian gothic literature are a repeated refrain, a ballad about the destruction of place and the devastating costs to the humans and non-humans. Sharae Deckard reminds us “capitalism is always in search of new commodity frontiers for extraction and appropriation,” and the alternate energy demands of the green transition continue to demand extraction. The lithium required especially for “electric vehicles and battery manufacturing” means the “demand for lithium” just in the United States, “is expected to grow more than six times by […] the end of the decade.” This demand is generating a new boom in Appalachian areas rich in lithium reserves: the federal government as well as several companies are investing in battery factories and electric car plants in the region. In economically depressed communities the prospect of new jobs as part of the green transition is vital, but in a region where extraction has come at great costs to the health of the environment and residents, there are grave concerns about the destructive impacts of this latest turn to Appalachia as a natural resource to be harnessed for the greater good. The question remains about whether the green transition can approach extraction any differently, especially when it is driven largely by the private sector.

The significance of this scholarship is to investigate how and why African Americans in the United States remain in persistent poverty. This research is important because it addresses the harsh inequalities that exist among African Americans through the use of federal policies. This scholarship challenges the United States’ governmental systems and its incorrect, misdirected policies that were created to minimize or eliminate poverty. It pleads with policymakers to reconceptualize poverty, moving them away from the improper, fixed, preconceived notions, and unfavorable ideologies about the poor. This scholarship is instrumental because it offers a prevailing paradigm shift in the United States’ public policy. It provides the federal government policymakers with prescriptions for the future that will look at problems differently, focusing on the structures within the governmental system instead of blaming the powerless individual. The goal is to promote new policy initiatives and recommendations for the future, with the use of specific guidelines for policymakers to incorporate.

Policymakers will utilize this research to gain new knowledge and information, as well as implement new public policies that would better address the poor and underprivileged in the United States. This information is useful to policymakers, allowing them to improve the quality of life among those individuals and families that remain persistently poor, by allocating more resources and funding and distributing it equally. This information will raise the public’s awareness about the “who is” the face of poverty and how it exists in a wealthy country, like the United States. This book will provide everyone with an understanding about the federal policies that were created to lessen or eliminate poverty, but actually perpetuated poverty among specific minority groups. This study demonstrates how the federal government uses its power through the creation of policies such as public housing, residential racial segregation, welfare, and underfunded educational systems. It will raise the public’s awareness about the government’s power and policies, which may encourage citizens to become more involved in the political process once they understand how it will or have directly affected their lives.

This scholarship contributes to the field of political science, sociology, public policy, and public administration. It is intended to encourage other scholars and policymakers to pursue further research on poverty and race. Public officials and community organizers may become interested in this research because it will provide a thorough structural critique of the United States’ public policies for the poor.

“There is a strange awfulness about Appalachia that quickens the imagination,” writes Guy Davenport in his 1968 review of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark (1968), drawing on the commonplace idea of Appalachia as a region distinctly other, distinctly gothic: a place replete with isolated communities, “hillbillies” and violent feuding families, a place to be feared. The idea of Appalachia as monstrous other was fueled by travelogues and literature of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and further compounded by the American eugenics movement. Richard Knox Robinson notes, “For over 100 years the American eugenics movement used the hillbilly stereotype to justify its surveillance, categorization, institutionalization, and sterilization of what they called ‘defectives’.” This othering of Appalachia and its people sat in direct contrast to the romanticization of Appalachia as a place where folk traditions and independence shaped local culture, turning the region into what Ronald Eller terms “a Janus-faced ‘other’.” While competing ideas of the region still hold firm in the national imaginary, sentimentalism pales into the background as the notion of Appalachia as horrific other prevails, repeatedly reanimated in an array of cultural productions including John Boorman's notorious 1972 film adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance (1970), Robert Schenkkan's play The Kentucky Cycle (1993), and J. D. Vance's controversial memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016). This book is the first extended study of Appalachia's major gothic literature, exploring both its extensive reach and impact as it challenges and changes ideas of the region and its people.

Of course, like many places across the world, Appalachia is replete with legends and folklore, and all manner of gothic creatures populate the region's storytelling. From the earliest Indigenous peoples to settler colonials, from slaves to their descendants, and the waves of immigration that continue to shape Appalachia, there are copious tales of shapeshifters, witches, creatures, cryptids, ghouls, ghosts, and monsters that haunt the region's storytelling. The region's literature also turns to several superstitions, including the tree in Granny May's garden full of dangling “Multicolored glass bottles” to capture and contain the “evils” that might “come skulking over the far hills, out of the lightless hollers” in Taylor Brown's Gods of Howl Mountain (2018) and the range of superstitions around childbirth such as the “cross/fastened to the pillow warding off haints” in Chanda Feldman's poem “But We Lived” (2018).

Wars and diseases of despair are neither uniquely Appalachian nor southern nor American, but they are decidedly gothic. As Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffan Hantke indicate, “The Gothic […] thrived in its infancy, in times of war” and from “the atrocities of the French Revolution” to “the Napoleonic Wars,” warfare “provided a steady background noise to the development of the genre.” Moreover, Carol Davison argues that ever since its earliest iterations “the Gothic and addiction go virtually hand-in-glove.” While the war gothic and what Davison terms, “Gothic pharmography,” cannot be claimed by any one subgenre of the gothic, Appalachia's complex role in the Civil War where many communities held divided loyalties between the Union and Confederacy, its high percentage of military personnel, and the propensity for diseases of despair where poverty and limited job opportunities can result in high addiction levels, mean both the war gothic and gothic pharmography recur across the region's literature. Appalachian authors commonly turn to Civil War ghosts, traumatized war veterans, zombie-like drug addicts, and vampiric Big Pharma, as they present a region that, according to Stephen J. Scanlan, is “‘mined’ for its citizens in the same way it has been mined for coal,” a region highly susceptible to the machinations of Big Pharma and military recruitment.

For Monnet and Hantke, the Civil War gothic largely emerged after 1865, and as Leigh M. McLennon explains, typically, “The history of the Civil War is often framed through narratives that posit binaries about slavery versus freedom, the North versus the South and, correspondingly, good versus evil.” However, such binaries do not hold up in many parts of Appalachia. As Kenneth W. Noe notes, one of the many misapprehensions of Appalachia is that the region was almost “totally Unionist,” a stereotype “rejected […] by modern Appalachian historians” who have revealed the region also had a significant Confederate population. At the same time, George McKinney explains, across the region “the majority of mountaineers resisted the move to create a separate Southern nation,” a “sentiment” that “was strongest in East Tennessee, northwestern Virginia, western Maryland, and southeastern Kentucky” where a commitment to the Confederacy was not immediately guaranteed.

Poverty is hunger. Poverty is a lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty reflects not single causes but cumulative disadvantages, and disadvantages do not cascade by accident. Persistent poverty can be seen among people who experience deprivation over many years and whose average incomes are below the poverty line for an extended period of time; it is those who are experiencing hardship because of their stage in the life cycle; and those who are discriminated against because of their social position at the local, regional, or national level. Individuals who live in persistent poverty experience several forms of disadvantage and are the least likely to benefit from public policy, which will keep them in poverty and block off their opportunities to escape.

African Americans in the United States are disproportionately impacted by poverty than any other population group. According to the United States Census Bureau, between 2021 and 2022, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites (from 8.1 percent to 8.6 percent), for African Americans (from 19.5 percent to 17.1 percent), and for Hispanics (from 17.1 percent to 16.5 percent). For Asians, the 2022 poverty rate (8.6 percent) was not statistically different from the 2021 poverty rate.

History has shown that substantial progress for African Americans has occurred over the last 40 years, but the life chances of the average African American or Latino child today are still very different from those of the average White or Asian child. According to Lin and Harris, times have changed in the United States, but what has not changed is the use of race, which creates categories that guide the distribution of opportunities as well as vulnerabilities toward negative treatment.

Ann Chih Lin and David R. Harris argue that race is at the center of any attempt to assess poverty because in the United States, our economy, our cultural frameworks, our repertoires, and our governmental policies have been shaped by a history of racial relations and racially influenced decision-making. As a result, our institutions, practices, and beliefs can foster racial discrimination disadvantage without any deliberate effort to discriminate. However, it is extremely important to consider the significance of discrimination in the context of persistent poverty among members of racial or ethnic minority groups.

This chapter will focus on the adaptations and imitations of Scandinavian ballads. These supernatural ballads helped make Scandinavia, particularly Denmark, a rich setting for the Gothic. Mapping this development is important, but the analysis addresses the underlying factors that led to the adaptation of Danish ballad material. The central author of the Gothicised ballad tradition was Matthew Lewis, who first incorporated a Danish ballad in The Monk and later selected several for his anthology Tales of Wonder. The chapter analyses how the ballad adaptations were bound up with Lewis’ career and developments in the book market.

The Danish ballads were acknowledged as constituting a repository that was part of British cultural history. Hence, they could be exploited as Gothic texts facilitating a more immediate and profound connection with native literary heritage. While Norse culture represented a definitive past, allowing for the safe appreciation of its supernatural figures, folkloric practices derived from Scandinavia required more careful management. This was due to its association with superstitious irrationalism, which was perceived to be actively embraced and preserved within low culture. The chapter aims to provide insight into the treatment of folklore, offering an understanding of how the Danish material was approached and also satirised in the context of Gothic publishing.

From The Monk to Tales of Wonder

In Britain, the recovery of ballads gained momentum in the course of the eighteenth century. Editions of the Scottish collector Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (first published in 1723) were popular, as was Thomas Percy's The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (first published in 1765). Johann Gottfried Herder translated several English ballads from Percy's collection for his Volkslieder (1778–79). Herder's anthology also contains some important examples of Danish ballads, which will be discussed below. Herder translated six Norse songs (categorised as ‘Skaldic’) and five Danish ballads. Herder's objective with Volkslieder was to use songs from around Europe to represent the essential character of ethnic and national groups. The Danish ballads that Herder printed were taken from an anthology of 100 folk ballads, published by Danish historian Anders Sørensen Vedel in 1591, and updated in a new edition edited by the folklorist Peder Syv in 1695, doubling the number of ballads. There was a popular reprint of this work in 1739, to which Herder refers.

My first encounter with Daphne Cooper was in 2007. She was enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at Clark Atlanta University, where I served as a professor. Dr. Cooper enrolled in several of my classes during her matriculation in the department. Among the classes was a seminar course organized around poverty policies in the United States. The question of the persistence of poverty among certain groups was the question that stood out for Dr. Cooper. She wanted to determine if there existed a link between poverty and public policies. Specifically, those policies which have as their goal the elimination of poverty.

While a student in my courses, Dr. Cooper and I collaborated on research projects. These collaborations were centered around inequality and public policies. In pursuit of her doctoral degree, Dr. Cooper conducted extensive research on the persistence of poverty among certain classes in the United States. She discovered that the answer to persistent poverty was as much a structural problem as it was an individual failing.

I served as chair of Dr. Cooper's dissertation committee, which gave me insight into her research process. However, more importantly, I was able to see how dedicated Dr. Cooper is to discover the why of a question and issue. This is evident in this book. The book is an expansion of the research she began as a doctoral student. This book digs deeper into the why of the persistence of poverty.

Dr. Cooper has used her extensive research in this area to explore the reasons for the vast and increasing inequality among groups in the United States. Dr. Cooper demonstrates that a society that is founded on individualism will not enact policies that challenge the status quo. Dr. Cooper argues that policies grounded in individualism and minimalism will produce short-term policies that must show immediate results.

Dr. Cooper challenges many of the notions on why poverty persists among very identifiable groups in U.S. society. Old notions are undermined and reasons as to why we should reconsider policymaking are thoroughly examined.

President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed office in November 1963, after John F. Kennedy's assassination. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in 1964, which was based on Kennedy's domestic programs, called The New Frontier that promised to outlaw segregation in federally supported housing (but not much else for civil rights), a higher minimum wage, federal aid for low-income housing and education, and hospital insurance for retirees. Lyndon B. Johnson agreed to tackle the poverty problem because it was an issue that was close to his heart. Having grown up in poverty and working during his adult life on policies that expanded opportunities, Johnson was eager to assist poor Americans he recognized the great need in America, making the anti-poverty programs his number one legislative priority. The anti-poverty programs of the War on Poverty went to Congress and were signed into law on August 20, 1964, which created a new agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

Congress and President Kennedy quickly implemented three initiatives that prefigured the War on Poverty. The first consisted of efforts to reform welfare. In 1962, the Kennedy administration won congressional approval for public welfare amendments that increased federal funding for training social workers and expanding services to recipients. The amendments were aimed to get people off welfare by encouraging and fostering conventional families and jobs; the method used would be intensive casework that involved counseling for self-esteem and life skills that might include job training and job placement. The people who planned the War on Poverty forged ahead with the same old conventional assumptions that the poor needed services and personal rehabilitation rather than a federal jobs program and more money. The second initiative was another program that linked concerns about structural unemployment and poverty. On May 1, 1961, Congress passed the Redevelopment Act, and as a result, depressed mining, textile, railroad, and fishing communities could apply for grants and loans to improve public facilities and attract new businesses. The third initiative that prefigured the War on Poverty was the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) of March 25, 1962. The notion behind this Act was the belief that rapid technological change, often called “automation” was pushing well-paid workers out of jobs and into poverty, eventually becoming a program for the poor and disadvantaged.

This chapter excavates the revisionary literary imaginings of Britain's Danish settlers and its former pagan religion of Odin. One mainstream view of the Viking attackers on churches and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is epitomised in the Oxford antiquarian Francis Wise's comment from the 1750s that ‘the Danes perpetuated such a scene of villainy as is scarce to be parallel’d in the stories of the most savage nations’. In texts published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several authors sought to reposition the Scandinavian element of British history. Through an analysis of select works by Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Ann Radcliffe, the chapter reveals how specific texts generated imaginative spaces to rethink and recontextualise the inheritances left by Scandinavian interlopers and settlers. The central contention is that authors presented the old antagonists in new guises as part of a historical trajectory, forging a more inclusive conception of British national identity. Through readings and contextualisation of key texts, I will demonstrate how fictional characters of Scandinavian origin come to symbolise Britain's progression towards social cohesion and a shared Christian faith. In other words, we find a recognition of the role of the ancient Danes in shaping the modern nation.

Revisiting Britain's ‘Others’

Against the backdrop of war and unrest in the 1790s, the spectre of past atrocities committed against the Danes is reflected in an often overlooked poem by William Wordsworth, first published in Lyrical Ballads (1800) entitled ‘A Fragment’ (later retitled ‘The Danish Boy. A Fragment’). The poem is a vignette of a ghost, a Danish boy, whose singing can sometimes be heard in a moorland dell. He can be seen as a ‘Spirit of noon-day’, almost like ‘a form of flesh and blood’, dressed in his ‘regal vest of fur […] In colour like a raven's wing’. As Wordsworth would later recall, the stanzas were initially meant ‘to introduce a Ballad upon the Story of a Danish Prince who had fled from Battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the Inhabitant of a Cottage in which he had taken refuge’. The killing of a prince who had deliberately abandoned war is an injustice, and this seems to explain why he has become a ghost haunting the landscape.