In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

Experiences in mental illness are often highly subjective and out of the ordinary and may be difficult to describe in ordinary language. Through images, metaphors, and other literary tools, literature can facilitate understanding that would not be possible otherwise.

Portrayals of psychiatry provide important feedback for clinicians on how they are perceived by their patients and also for the public on how those with mental illness perceive their position in society. This feedback is often negative, but there are positive examples too. Patients often write about the humanity of the psychiatrist and appreciate their being versed in a range of disciplines, including art or music.

Literature is about weaving a narrative, which is an important part of recovery in psychiatry. Only in literature are we afforded more licence to use our imaginations and less bounded by the limits of reality. In literature, patients and psychiatrists can express many of their thoughts, feelings, and values that could be seen as inappropriate or ‘unprofessional’ in any other context.

Literary works can lay bare those aspects of the cultural and moral context of practice that we may not think about otherwise, including the origins of relevant societal and professional values.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

In the 1990s, the challenges of representing the (perhaps, arguably) unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust were hotly debated. The issue still poses crucial theoretical questions that have animated a wide array of both scholarly and aesthetic responses. One might think, for instance, of the very different representational strategies adopted by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah and Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List as marking two ends of the spectrum on how to represent the Holocaust. This chapter articulates the theoretical terrain upon which Holocaust representation unfolds and, in this respect, serves as a theoretical companion to the topic-specific culture chapters that follow.

Chapter 1 presents Ovid in exile as a highly self-conscious, reflexive figure whose ironic turns perforate a real desire to effect both an imperial pardon and poetic immortality. Moreover, the chapter situates Ovid as the first respondent to his exile, finding many points of commonality between the ways that Ovid and medieval respondents reacted to his exile (in other words, medieval audiences used Ovid as a model for their responses). This chapter makes these arguments from three perspectives. Firstly, it characterises Ovid’s response, focusing especially on his desire to control the narrative being relayed both to Augustus in Rome and to posterity. Secondly, it explores Ovid’s tendency to revise his works. He edits and revises his pre-exilic poetry from the perspective of his exile and reworks his exile poetry over the course of his relegation. Finally, it argues that Ovid’s depictions of his exile as severe are another vehicle for modelling a flexible response. Overall, Ovid constructed an authoritative hold over his life and works but nevertheless formed a response which allowed for ambiguities that could be embedded into that authority. This double model allowed medieval respondents to incorporate both equivocation and authority into their own poetic self-presentation.

Chapter 4 shows how the Russian hawks’ ideas moved from the fringes to the center of the public sphere in the early 2000s. It investigates the 2001–02 controversy that surrounded the publication of a novel written by one of the most radical conservative ideologues, Aleksandr Prokhanov. It demonstrates that the controversy reconfigured the formerly consensual distinction between legitimate and transgressive public discourse. It explains that the intellectual legitimation of Prokhanov thrived on Russia’s political and intellectual elites’ backlash against the legacy of the 1990s and the standards of Western liberalism. The controversy eventually contributed to normalizing modernist conservatism, which gained a new audience among the younger generation of intellectuals.

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

This chapter addresses the question of digital space in/and literary studies, exploring how literary fiction has been shaped by the digital and how it has, in turn, shaped conceptions of digital space. Across a period of roughly 35 years, the chapter traces changing understandings of digital space in and through the literary. Beginning with the emergence of cyberspace as a virtual, “placeless” space in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the concomitant but short-lived rise of hypertext theory, the chapter articulates how early formations of digital space were fundamentally bound up with questions of the literary. It then turns to more recent shifts in understanding the space of the digital as a more hybrid one that recognises social existence as being simultaneously, and co-constitutively, physical and virtual. To illustrate this more hybrid spatiality, the chapter draws focus to new dynamics of literary creation, distribution, and consumption as well as recent representations and remediations of this kind of hybrid spatiality in “internet” or “social media” novels that work to capture the compression of online and offline communicative social space.

Chapter VI offers a final overview of the main themes addressed in the book and integrates them into a cohesive, overarching framework. In the first part, I discuss the meta-literary implications of Gandalf’s fall as described in Chapter V and illustrate Tolkien’s concern for what can be properly described as a ‘death of the author’ – to use the concept of Roland Barthes. This is clarified through an extensive discussion of Tolkien’s meta-literary short story Leaf by Niggle, in which one can trace all main features of the ‘sub-creative death’. The second part explores other important elements of Tolkien’s ‘theory’, focusing on the meta-literary significance of Gandalf’s return, and introducing a related concept that I call ‘the resurrection of the author’. This concept is explored through a discussion of five ‘gifts’ bestowed to Niggle’s tree in the eponymous story by the Divine Voices (completion, realisation, ramification, harmony, and prophecy), which conjure up a vision of divine enhancement of human literature, with fascinating eschatological implications.

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.