This chapter undertakes two transnational reception studies to show how comic style was valued. The first demonstrates how the overanimated, racialized effects of minstrelsy mediated the American genesis and British reception of Artemus Ward’s underplayed deadpan. The second reception study shows how lectures on American humor in colonial Australia mediated the national humor discourse that developed late in the century. By tracing national humor discourse through two genres of public speech, lectures and the reporting on them, the chapter builds on Daniel Wickberg’s framing of humor as “a value within a culture” to show that value in formation within and across cultures. It argues that not only how humor was talked about but also how it was not talked about shows its cultural value. The chapter concludes by considering how colonial discourse on Aboriginal humor, which was not discussed in Australian humor lectures, positioned it in relation to settler institutions and knowledge systems.

Early examples of deadpan theatrical performance in Australia are heavily mediated by English and American theatre cultures and do not readily map onto nascent discourses on Australian humor or Australian comic character types such as the laconic bushman or the larrikin. Early examples of deadpan performers and productions in Australia do, however, participate in projects of colonial institution-building. This chapter considers early colonial deadpan performance as part of transnational genteel culture. Drawing on digitized newspaper accounts of performance style, it examines the reception of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore (1878) in 1879, when comic actor and budding theatre impresario J. C. Williamson paid the British D’Oyly Carte Opera Company £300 for the sole rights to stage it in Australia and New Zealand. By comparing Williamson’s production with three other unauthorized productions of Pinafore that ran nearly simultaneously, it shows how style signified on the colonial stage at a moment that shaped international theatre production and management practices.

From the earliest reviews of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s poems until the last quarter of the twentieth century, many commentators on her works were concerned as much, if not more, with the fact that she wrote, as they were with what she wrote. Both sides cited Phillis’s humanity and writings to support their respective positions in the eighteenth-century debate over the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, in the nineteenth-century argument over the abolition of slavery, and in the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality. Thomas Jefferson infamously dismissed her and her work. From the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, many Black as well as white literary critics expressed neo-Jeffersonian denunciations of Phillis’s literary achievement and racial loyalty. Black women have led the resistance to such attacks. A renaissance of interest in recovering the life and work of Phillis Wheatley Peters, and a revolution in the critical evaluation of both, have been underway since the 1980s.

Chapter 9 examines how the Odyssey has been continuously reimagined across nearly three millennia, from Dante to contemporary film and literature. It explores how each generation has found in Odysseus’ journey a framework for understanding war trauma, exile, diaspora, and displacement, demonstrating that the epic endures not as a fixed text but as a living narrative that speaks to experiences of loss, return, and the ongoing struggle to rebuild meaning after catastrophe.

The epilogue reflects on the reception of the ancient tradition explored in this book, but also reflects more widely on the values of genealogical and comparative approaches to intellectual history. It ends with a brief reflection on the relevance of this book’s argument for today.

The following chapter examines the reception of Byzantium through the lenses of the Church and Orthodoxy. The conventional term ‘Byzantium’ — though currently disputed — remains the most widely used name for the Eastern Roman Empire. Byzantine reception surpasses mere texts; it encompasses Byzantine literature, art, culture and the liturgical tradition. This brief survey opens with a general discussion on Byzantine reception up to the modern era, offering several examples that illustrate how Orthodoxy and the Church, broadly defined, were (re)appropriated in the period following the Fall of Constantinople. It then delves into aspects of Byzantium’s reception intricately tied to the concept of the Church, encompassing both architectural structures and artifacts, as well as religious identities and traditions.

This chapter surveys the nine symphonies of Vaughan Williams in terms of salient features that have defined both their musical content and critical reception. It particularly emphasises his conscious deviation from classical symphonic principles in creating one of the most significant cycles in all twentieth-century music. It concludes with an exhortation for sympathetic interpreters to judge these works on their own terms, with the hope that this body of music can attain deserved prominence in the concert hall that has yet eluded it.

To consider Romanticism, world literature, and empire together entails reexamining the position of authors like Byron not only within the British Empire but also within other imperial formations, such as the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on Byron’s Ottoman Turkish reception, where he seems to exert no influence on local literary-cultural sensibilities, this chapter explores possibilities of envisioning a world literature that does not reproduce Western capitalist value systems. Byron’s “insignificant” presence in the Ottoman Turkish textual-visual landscape undermines the Eurocentric romanticization of the cultural capital attributed to Western icons among non-Anglophone audiences; simultaneously, it fuels a critical reflection on the empire-empire nexus that complicates the conventional geocultural hierarchies (e.g., East versus West, Orient versus Occident, etc.) shaping the contours of world literature.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

The introduction outlines the key themes of the book and offers brief summaries of individual chapters. It offers a brief overview of Keats’s letters and a summary of their publication history, their reception, and their place in his public reputation. The chapter proposes that Keats’s letters can be considered as a body of work in its own right, and that literary criticism needs to develop an epistolary poetics to enable and support a formal critical reading of his correspondence.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

The interwar era was a formative period in Elizabeth Maconchy’s development as a composer, and much can be gleaned through a cross section of British musical circles between the First and Second World Wars. The endemic misogyny of the time, which affected the prospects of both earlier and contemporaneous female composers, had a profound impact on what opportunities were available to her as well as how her works were received. Many of the connections she made at this time – such as those forged with her professors and fellow students at the Royal College of Music – would endure for the rest of her career. Maconchy was interested in both continental modernism and Irish and Welsh nationalism, involved in the Macnaghten and Lemare concert series – which provided much-needed performance opportunities for young composers – as well as the pageant Music for the People, which furthered left-wing political causes such as anti-fascism, anti-racism, and class consciousness.

This survey chapter considers the public reception of female composers across the UK, USA, France, Germany and Austria at four points during Elizabeth Maconchy’s life, taking three or four examples from each period: 1904–10, 1932–9, 1959–60 and 1994–5. Composers at the end of their careers, such as Pauline Viardot and Irène Wieniawska (Poldowski) are considered alongside younger talents including Errollyn Wallen, Ruth Gipps and Margaret Bonds. Changing attitudes to class, race, ‘appropriate’ musical genres for women to engage with, and the very question of how intellectual and emotionally profound female composers could be, are considered – both in terms of prevailing narratives, and notable exceptions. Consideration is also given to the question of how these composers might be reincorporated into the historical narrative; and how much work remains to be done to raise awareness of their creative efforts.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.