Beginning with the Paolo and Francesca episode from Dante’s Inferno, this chapter focuses on rewritings of the episode by Hunt in The Story of Rimini and by Byron in Don Juan and ‘Francesca of Rimini’. These rewritings provide insight into the erotics of shared reading and the subsequent uncertainty surrounding Francesca’s claim that, when she and Paolo settled down to read together, they did so ‘without suspicion’. Teasing out the ambiguities in Dante’s text, Hunt and Byron suggest that reading allows desire to be acknowledged in tacit ways that invite or evade self-awareness (or self-suspicion). Their interpretations of Francesca’s speech also offer reflections on their own poetic styles, with Hunt questioning the difference between naturalness and artfulness, and Byron questioning the sincerity of veiled self-disclosure.

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

This essay examines the remarkable phenomenon of “life stories,” which the Spanish Inquisition required of its defendants after 1561. The narratives offered by defendants fit into a wider cultural context in two ways. First, they match a rise in autobiographical consciousness which was increasingly present in all sorts of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century. Second, the life stories demanded by Spanish inquisitors also.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

Abstract: This chapter engages closely with the key state of nature passages in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. It shows how each text constructs strikingly distinct imaginaries of the state of nature, and begins to explore some of the real-world implications of these imaginaries.

Illuminating the collectively held sentiments and widely shared narratives of citizens in the Taegu-Kyǒngbuk and Gangnam regions, this chapter analyzes why these citizens have unwaveringly supported the conservative party and explains the spatial and popular basis of the right in South Korea. I argue that these citizens’ conservative political orientation and voting behaviors are shaped by the places where they interact daily with other members in their communities and cultivate a shared political identity. Using the two terms nostalgic loyalists and privileged materialists, I compare two primary conservative constituencies. The former share strong pride of place in Taegu-Kyǒngbuk as the hometown of the national modernizer Park Chung Hee and as the engine of rapid economic development during the Park Chung Hee regime, while the latter enjoy a sense of superiority and exclusivity deriving from living in Gangnam, a neighborhood that symbolizes wealth and cultured lifestyles.

This chapter recounts the history of the functional approach to autobiographical memory and lays out ways to move the field forward. In the 1970s, prominent cognitive psychologists called for research to expand beyond controlled experimental laboratory procedures to examine memory in everyday life. Early research theorized three broad functions from which a self-report measure was developed. The functional approach is intuitively appealing, but its growth has been somewhat haphazard. One barrier may be the lack of a solid, agreed-upon, definition. To aid the field in moving forward, we present a clear, detailed definition of function. Using criteria related to this definition allows other candidate functions to be rigorously considered. Two candidate functions are explored. Existing work suggesting that emotion enhancement may be a function of autobiographical memory is reviewed and compared with our definition. We then elaborate on a new proposal that social status may be a function of autobiographical remembering. Finally, a brief discussion of how narrative approaches to recalling the personal past might be used to study functions of autobiographical memory is presented.

realism continues to be misunderstood under the influence of 1970s literary and film theory and its continuing import underrecognized in literary and cultural histories. My approach to realism is formalist in the sense that Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction is formalist: it is a “descriptive poetics.” My argument is motivated primarily by what I regard as serious persistent errors in academic discourses.These errors are in large measure the result of arguments within the Left. My goal in this book is not to restore realism to the place Georg Lukács once assigned it as the only politically correct kind of literature, but rather to show the continued vitality of realism in late-20th century American culture

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Developments in magical realist critical discourse have benefited the study of African literature in several ways. The notion that there is no single point of origin for magical realism refocuses critical attention on African oral traditions, where the supernatural has long mingled with realist elements. And clarity over the nature and purposes of magical realism allows insight into how it simultaneously enables recuperation and critique. This essay considers the history of attempts to theorize magical realism in Africa, before turning to two often-neglected early exemplars of the mode, Thomas Mofolo and Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa’s countryman, Amos Tutuola, developed the African mode of magical realism in flamboyant ways, as did Ben Okri, and, later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In interpreting the work of Ngũgĩ the discussion circles back to global interlocutors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie because, like them, Ngũgĩ self-consciously deploys magical realism to facilitate satire and powerful political critique.

Arts-mediated HIV/AIDS education received significant funding from Ghana’s donor partners and global health institutions during the first two decades of the pandemic. Yet these interventions had a mixed impact. On the one hand, there was – and continues to be – near universal awareness of HIV/AIDS, including risk factors and health outcomes. On the other hand, low condom use and persistent stigma suggest that knowledge has not translated into sexual health protective behaviours and psychosocial support. In Chapter 4, I examine how the arts were incorporated into HIV/AIDS interventions, focusing on the use of mass media campaigns to raise awareness and educate, and on ‘folk media’ to educate and empower communities. I discuss a study that applied a narrative approach to examine local knowledge and lived experience, the findings of which illustrate important contrasts between community and indigenous healing system responses to HIV/AIDS and official health service responses. I will conclude with reflections on what these insights yield for developing more robust arts-based HIV interventions in the future.

How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

This introductory chapter begins by considering two general features of the politics of territory in modernity: the expectation that borders should be precisely defined as lines, and the central role of colonial legacies. The book centres on the relation between these two features. Four narratives about the global history of borders that the book seeks to engage with and modify are elaborated: first, colonial-inherited borders are generally remarkable for their vagueness; second, linear borders are originally and most properly a practice of sovereign states or nation-states; third, lines on maps determine politics; and fourth, linear borders were first practiced in Europe, then exported to the rest of the world through colonialism. The chapter outlines the argument and the rest of the book. At its most general level, the argument is that modern borders are distinct not because they express sovereignty but because of certain technical, apolitical practices.