This chapter examines the development of Toby Litt's work and how it is informed by the grotesque in terms of its consistent use of distortion and humour and in relation to its complex fusion of the prosaic and the fantastic. It shows how his literary career has been shaped by an arguably postmodern approach to contemporary culture but one that is also based on a contemporary form of the literary grotesque. Toby Litt's first collection of stories, Adventures in Capitalism was first published in 1996 and immediately created a critical stir around its inventive approach to the world of branding and consumerism. If Adventures in Capitalism in its pursuit of a comic grotesque bears comparison with the work of Martin Amis and Will Self, then deadkidsongs is an ambitious novel that enters similar terrain to Ian McEwan's disturbing stories of childhood and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory.

The English language has been attested in Ireland since the late twelfth century but did not become widespread until the beginning of the seventeenth century when vigorous planting of English settlers took place. Distinct forms of Irish English began to develop which were a mixture of diverse dialectal inputs from England and transfer phenomena from Irish as the native population began to switch to the language of the colonisers. Almost as the same time as planting of English settlers started there was a movement out of Ireland, either by deportation or voluntary emigration, largely due to economic circumstances. This led to areas in overseas anglophone regions showing centres of Irish emigration, e.g. Appalachia with eighteenth-century Ulster Scots or the north-eastern coast of the USA with nineteenth-century southern Irish Catholics. At these locations the linguistic impact of Irish English was slight but traces can be found still which testify to this input.

As hip-hop grew between the 1980s and 1990s, rising from a set of small regional aesthetic and cultural practices, it slowly turned into fodder for billion-dollar businesses, broadening from music to include fashion, film, and television. This chapter explores the configuration of white business interests, the creativity of working-class communities of color, and the investments of avant-garde artists who created hip-hop as a commercial art form. These circumstances extended what was initially a regional set of expressions and practices of youth subcultures into a globally celebrated aesthetic. Cinema was central in the transitioning of street art forms like graffiti and vernacular dance into a set of codes and practices shared by practitioners around the world.

The siege of Paris, which began soon after the Emperor's surrender at Sedan and the declaration of a republican government, brought great disruption to daily life. Business was impossible to transact in normal terms and Emile and Isaac Pereire thus found themselves confounded in their various attempts to find solutions to the problems of the Credit Mobilier and Compagnie Immobiliere. The Pereires' major shareholding in the Austrian railway was another useful tool in restoring the family's position. While Isaac was attempting to keep the family businesses afloat throughout the difficult time, ordinary life in Paris was challenging. Despite the collapse of the Credit Mobilier and the eventual demise of the Compagnie Immobiliere, the Pereires had left a considerable legacy in public infrastructure and iconic companies. Many of the remaining Pereire businesses stayed afloat until well into the twentieth century.

This chapter examines how Anne Greene's story was told and retold in 'popular' poetic form, and asks how such poetry might work to construct a narrative about female subjectivity under the law. Three pamphlet accounts of Anne's case appeared in early 1651 and were reprinted repeatedly thereafter. Of these works, two, William Burdet's A Wonder of Wonders and the anonymous A Declaration from Oxford, were issued by the London printer. Newes from the Dead, attributed to an Oxford 'scholler' called Richard Watkins, was produced by Leonard Lichfield, official printer to Oxford University. The presentation of the criminal, or criminalised, female in poetry is most usually via ballad or complaint, in verse forms associated with pamphlets, news-books and other ephemera. The chapter demonstrates how an elite re-rendering of the narratives that surround criminal women may transform our understanding of a genre traditionally associated with strategies of simplification and containment.

Rowheath Park at Bournville (from 1921) and the Hills and Dales Park, the Old Barn Club and Old River Park, made for NCR employees between 1906 and 1939, are highly significant to the history of corporate landscapes in terms of their scale and the sophistication of their designs in a factory context. A comparison of these parks, designed by landscape architects Cheals of Crawley, and the Olmsted Brothers respectively, reveal differences in the cultural, symbolic and stylistic approaches to landscape design in the two nations, including what it was possible to achieve in the suburban landscapes of Britain and the United States and in the beliefs, desires and expectations of the factory worker and his patriarch in what the landscape could provide for them. In context of corporate recreation, the scale and sophistication of these gardens and parks were astonishing and unprecedented. Their landscape architects succeeded in projecting local and national landscape identities through design, thus creating spaces that heightened employees’ sense of belonging to the region and to the corporate community.