While immaterial labor characterizes so much of the work undertaken within typically western core states this brief Afterword thinks about the unequal development and division of labor globally. If the division of labor is central to the capitalist world-systemthen the narration of labor as tragic might extend to world literature. Following this leadthe chapter turns to the work of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to think provisionally about how the enclosing between a core and periphery is constitutive to an idea of the United States that is itself tragic.

The Introduction theorizes the relationships between tragedy affect and labor within modern US fiction. Affect is key to showing how and in what forms a classical mode like tragedy persists into late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels. Likewise a study of the changing organization of labor – a shift in wage work toward jobs described as immaterial or affective – is central to understanding why and under which historical conditions we see the resurgence of tragedy as affect in major works of literature. Literature in this argument articulates the collective imaginary of a people in a specific time and place. The chapter proposes that the apposition of an ill-fated and newly created class of immaterial laborers during the economic and political crises of the postwar period generates a tragic structure of feeling. Tragedy resides as both a form and a feeling that are as much concerned with the fearful misery of singular characters caught up in domestic dramas as with collective suffering played out on a public (and more overtly political) stage.

This chapter introduces the fundamental concepts of computational problems, algorithms, and time and space efficiency. These concepts are formally defined and illustrated with examples. The major time and space complexity classes P, EXP, L, and PSPACE are introduced. The chapter concludes by defining reductions, which are tools for relating complexities of different problems.

This chapter systematically moves through the key questions of critique as a mode of building and improving knowledge in the humanities. It surveys key works in the conversation in relation to a variety of critical conversations and traditions, relating the questions of critique to major projects and goals in the field.

The public discourse on class and stratification in Japan experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. Although widely portrayed as an egalitarian and predominantly middle-class society during the period of high economic growth until the early 1990s, Japan was suddenly deemed a society divided along class lines under the prolonged stagnation that characterized the Japanese economy for three decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s.

Based on macro-sociological data, this chapter delineates the focal points of debate on the analysis of class and stratification in Japan as a general prelude to specific spheres covered later in the book – cultural diversity and class competition in relation to generation, region, labor, education, gender, ethnicity, and so on.

This chapter discusses Amis’s London Trilogy – Money, London Fields, and The Information – and identifies common themes and approaches across the three novels. It argues that this body of work constitutes the high point of his literary career and will be the works for which he will be most likely remembered. The themes the chapter discusses include his interest in the discourses of cultural politics informing the period, most notably with respect to class, gender, toxic masculinity, and the advent of Thatcherism. It also focuses his use of metafiction, which adds complexity to the positions the novels seem to take on social, cultural, and political issues, as well as allowing an implicit meta-critique of the state of contemporary culture and literature. Other themes it discusses are how London is presented, the mood he creates of impeding millennial doom, and the associated themes of themes of ageing and crisis.

Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

This chapter engages with the issue of voice and freedom of expression by interrogating the function of the patient-editor. It explores the stories of the known editors and printers of the unpublished Moon (1882) of the New York City Lunatic Asylum and the first two series of the Gartnavel Gazette (1853–54; 1855), produced and internally circulated in the Glasgow Royal Asylum. The archives associated with these publications offer a glimpse into the relationships that periodical publishing involved. They show that asylum periodicals emerged out of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration – perhaps not unlike other similar publications at the time. This case study reveals that forces other than institutional supervision were at work. The editors’ class-based aesthetics and individual preferences in selecting material for publication, as well as conflicts among patients impacted asylum periodicals. The study of this newspaper also offers evidence that, far from polished records of asylum life, asylum periodicals embodied tensions. Patients’ grievances did find a place in their pages, even if complaints and attacks were softened with humour and irony.

During the twentieth century, significant legal, social and cultural changes occurred in Britain and Ireland which provided opportunities for an increasingly diverse pool of symphonic composers. Changing attitudes and laws regarding women and the LGBTQ+ community, the path the UK has charted regarding ethnicity, and shifting definitions of class have had a significant impact on who had access to a musical education and to the networks necessary to forge a career as a composer. This chapter examines the broader socio-cultural history of Britain and Ireland since 1900 to investigate the important milestones and small gestures that have led to the present. It explores the various demographic frames of reference for the composers discussed in the book, including gender, ethnicity, social class and sexual orientation, establishing a context for the discussions that follow.

The chapter starts by examining the backlash among Orangemen in the Border Counties to Éire’s 1948 unilateral decision to leave the British Commonwealth and become a republic. Coming to terms with the new constitutional reality was traumatic, and adaptation was not facilitated by the Catholic hierarchy, which was in full crusading mood against domestic heresy and foreign communism. The chapter examines a few high-profile cases – including the 1956 Hungarian refugees episode and the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea Boycott – and explores the mix of complacency, insecurity and resignation with which both Jews and Protestants responded to the mounting intolerance of the church hierarchy. An age of anxieties, the 1950s was also an age of extremes for the Irish minorities. Just when they seemed to be at their lowest ebb, supine under clerical dictation, while the Orange Order was fighting and losing old peripheral battles, Irish civil society came to the rescue and liberal opinion started to question traditional deference to Catholic power.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

This chapter reviews recent research on identity and second language (L2) learning. It begins with an introduction that highlights identity as fluid, complex and intersectional. It then outlines conceptual frameworks commonly adopted in this line of inquiry, including poststructuralism and sociocultural and critical approaches. The chapter then identifies categories in L2 learning, including heritage and multilingual learners, gender and sexual identities, racialized identities and socioeconomic class. In the review of heritage and multilingual learners, we highlight recent research on translanguaging that illustrates linguistic hybridity and complexities, as well as the works that challenge Eurocentric tendencies by focusing on multilingualism in the periphery. The section on gender and sexual identities discusses research on gender nonconformative L2 learners and sexual minorities. The review of the research on racialized identities provides an analysis of racism and coloniality as apparatuses and conditions of L2 learning. Finally, through our overview of the works on social class, we reflect on class not just as an external condition of language learning, but as an identity that shapes and is shaped by language learning. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions for identity and L2 learning.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.