The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

Historiographies of modern literature are often dominated by a view that perceives modernity as emerging from a break with tradition. This chapter challenges that view by arguing that Hasidic hagiography, a devout religious genre, played a fundamental role in modernizing Jewish culture and shaping the Jewish masses as a new phenomenon in Jewish experience. It proposes a historical model that examines the negative dialectic tensions among fragments of literary history, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage in film theory. The approach compares fragments of literary history as independent “shots” within a dynamic system. The chapter contrasts the Hasidic popular genre of the 1860s with the contemporary Hebrew writings that set the tone for literary canonization and historiography. It highlights how Hasidic literary, theological, and ideological values differed from and even threatened the teleological narratives of secular Hebrew literature while also complementing them. Hasidic popular stories provided lingual flexibility freeing rabbinical Hebrew from the confines of Halakhic writing and avoiding eschatological national and secular ideologies. This allowed the masses to achieve modern literacy without breaking with tradition. The historiographical montage enables a reconsideration of literary historiography as a dynamic network of convergences and ruptures.

Abstract: The state of nature is a foundational concept for modern Western thought, influencing ideas about colonialism, secularization, and ecology. It is a fractured idea that shines a light on the contemporary culture wars, and continues to shape debates on human nature, political structures, and the legacy of the West.

Abstract: The Conclusion argues that the state of nature remains central to understanding the fractured condition of modern Western thought, particularly in the fields of colonialism, secularism, and ecology. It highlights the continuing relevance of the notion for interpreting the fragmented imaginaries of Western modernity.

In the Conclusion, I return to the relationship between Sturmy’s voyage and the other ships which crossed the seas in the late fifteenth century.

Abstract: This chapter understands modernity’s fragmented and contradictory secular modernities through the prism of the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It offers a new taxonomy of the varieties of modern secularization in terms of deflationary, collateral, and psychologizing imaginaries.

Abstract: This chapter theorizes three “figures” – the theoretical gestures or patterns – of the state of nature: a flattening of complexity, a partition between natural and civil conditions, and a normalization one of the sides of the partition. It argues that these figures recur across Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau’s work, where they present en abyme characteristic patterns of Western modernity.

This chapter discusses the concept of the visual imaginary and the visualism apparent across all of Kenneth Slessor’s writing, including his war journalism and poetry. It argues that Slessor’s career as a film writer for the popular press is related to the visualism of his poetry and to the history of cinema in Australia. The chapter analyses the relation between the light effects in Slessor’s poetry and the existential state of the poet, including in the elegiac ‘Five Bells’. It concludes with a discussion on the relation between Slessor’s war despatches about World War II in North Africa and the elegy for the casualties of war.

While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

How does culture interact with cities – their growth, their beauties, their imaginaries – in recent times (mid-nineteenth century to the present)? How do writers represent cities in both narrative and poetic texts? How do visual artists depict them in paintings, drawings and photography? And what happens when cities are presented by both text and image at the same time?

Beyond representation, cities are also a playground for artists, a stage and a place to challenge the urban imaginary. The city is a dream topic and a dream place for illustrated books, magazines and hybrid works of art such as movies and performance, but also for street art. It is also a proper character of both visual and textual representations. What if it is considered as an intermedial object per se?

This chapter emphasises the imaginary dimension of the city, showing in particular how the city has been considered by writers and artists as the paragon of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century. Each of its five sections focuses on one issue of the urban experience in art and literature and on a particular genre of art.

Science, technology, and medicine (STM) and the European city are inextricably linked. In the mid-nineteenth century this intricate relationship became dialectic. The urban space not only served as a facilitator of knowledge production and circulation, but was also transformed by STM.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.