This chapter explores Pablo Neruda’s militant trajectory, asserting that his political commitment was not merely circumstantial but permeated his entire poetic oeuvre. Divided into two sections, the first section scrutinizes the political implications of his work, discernible from Residencia en la tierra onward, where societal issues arising from the crisis of capitalist modernity culminate in a robust Marxist commitment. The second part employs the Foucauldian concept of “parrhesia” to analyze Neruda’s actions and work, emphasizing his explicit commitment in Chile. There, he supported Allende’s socialist government and confronted the challenges of Pinochet’s subsequent neoliberal dictatorship. This analysis underscores the integral connection between Neruda’s political engagement and his lyrical creations, contributing to the recognition of the inseparable political dimension within his poetic work.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, the nation’s authentic character was sought among the ‘timeless’ countryfolk rather than in its ancient ancestry. Paradoxically, this turn from ‘past to peasant’ took place during a period of accelerated, technology-driven and urbanizing modernity, as more unrestricted, commercially driven, mass-appeal cultural media became available. This chapter traces the interaction between the modern city and the timeless country, from world fairs to the art theatres of the fin-de-siècle. The chapter concludes by outlining how the new modern and decorative arts (Arts and Crafts, art nouveau) functioned as carriers of progressive national revival movements in Europe’s sub-imperial capitals, from Dublin and Barcelona to Prague and Riga; and how their anti-imperial emancipation agenda was uneasily poised between progressive cosmopolitanism and nativist essentialism.

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.

The book’s Introduction begins by considering definitions of folk music, specifically that developed by the International Folk Music Council during the 1950s. I point out that Cecil Sharp’s work had a profound influence on this conception. The underlying logic behind such definitions is a habit of opposition in which folk music is situated as a paradigm of authenticity in contrast to something else tainted with commerce, frivolity, or bourgeois individualism. I show that folk music has most often been understood through a characteristic form of Marxist nostalgia surrounding older forms of culture opposed to modernity, capitalism, mass media, and the culture industry. The appeal of the folk, I suggest, has chiefly been as a vehicle of critique – a way of identifying alternative ways of being. As illustrations, I turn to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anti-colonial vision of Indian nationalism as well as the recent ‘ShantyTok’ trend on TikTok. Ultimately, folk music and song are inextricable from the social communities they have brought to life.

An introduction to the idea of national identity, the question of its modernity, and its relation to ethnic and racial identity. The possibility that England uniquely lacked such an identity, or that the whole English population was never immersed in it, is also considered.

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.