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.

Chapter 2 provides a survey of material produced and circulating in medieval Ireland. Situating the evidence within the cultural and historical context of the island, it argues that the richness of the vernacular English archive is important to understand this period. The chapter outlines surviving vernacular material in English, which includes historical, religious, and practical works. Offering a fresh overview of the literary landscape, the chapter reveals unknown or less-explored material. Throughout, attention is paid to manuscript contexts to provide a more complete picture of the literary landscape. The chapter is also interested in absences and interactions. It traces the impact of early modern interest or disinterest in various works, and reflects on cultural engagement between the Irish and English spheres. It also interrogates the absence of medieval romance in English in Ireland and explores intersections between writing in English and Irish, and the bilingual environment of medieval Ireland.

‘The National Tale’ argues that we ought to consider the national tale to be a mode, rather than a genre, in that the former can operate across genres and forms (literary and non-literary). From this perspective, the national tale is a literary mode in which problems of national identity and political sovereignty are narrativised in a form that produces a solution. The intermarriage of coloniser and colonised that is found in national tales in the romance mode, notably those of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and especially her Wild Irish Girl (1806), provides a familiar instance. Equally, there are national tales that function within the genres of the historical novel and of the Gothic novel. Across these generic forms, the national tale often encodes a resistance to the modern nation-state but, in so doing, exposes the impossibility of solving the problems of sovereignty and autonomy that they identify.

This chapter shows how, contrary to modern assumptions, the Press distinguished between Historical and “Gothic” or Terror Fiction and how, contrary to what Romantic critics pretended, Minerva’s women authors ridiculed and dismissed Walpolean Gothic with its specters and clanking chains. Eliza Parsons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, Mary Meeke, Isabella Kelly, Agnes Mulgrave, Regina Maria Roche and anonymous others innovated, instead, by displacing the language of terror to the “unnatural” or criminal acts that families hid from public view – primarily husbands’ sadistic domestic abuse, incest, bigamy and fratricide – while inflecting “Gothic Romance” into the Mystery Story. They also imported and developed the “German” uncanny in a line leading straight to Collins, Bradden, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Poe, and taught readers to be skeptical both of names and of stories.

Lane ignored Perrault in favor of repeatedly publishing and repurposing his rival seventeenth-century French conteuses, most notably Mme D’Aulnoy. While addressing many of the same domestic and political issues as Minerva Terror Fiction and Minerva Historicals, these contes de fée unsentimentally performed their promise, “Whatever you wish you shall have,” while warning readers to be careful what they wished for. The second section considers novel Minerva fictions that preempted nineteenth-century realism by infusing magical fairy-tale materials into novels conducted in the real world.

This chapter’s survey of Los Angeles’s African American literary history concentrates on how the literature of South Los Angeles and South Central, major centers of population and culture in Black LA, portrays space, history, and belonging, as well as with racism and inequality. The chapter discusses Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and the widespread, enduring impact of the Watts Writers Workshop, which emerged in response to the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Batiste also addresses the depiction of racism, challenges of urban life, and the promise of social revolution in works by Quincy Troupe, Kamau Daàood, Wanda Coleman, Walter Mosley, Michael Datcher, Jervey Tervalon, Sanyika Shakur, Dana Johnson, Lisa Teasley, and Paul Beatty. Batiste dedicates particular attention to the publishing ecosystem of Black popular fiction, which often escapes scholarly attention and in which several Black LA authors prospered throughout the 1990s.

This chapter examines early Southern California fiction, such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885), exposing how historical nineteenth-century romance whitewashed a diverse transnational and multicultural territory. This chapter argues that by sugarcoating the realities of a violent and racialized colonial conquest, early Southern California fiction romanticized the region and its climate as a refuge where White settlers could improve their health. For Meylor, Ruiz de Burton also underscores the purported whiteness of her Californio characters to gain the empathy of her readers. By the 1920s, this chapter argues, literature had begun to depict LA as an Anglo city about to transition into a growing metropolis, but counter-narratives were already emerging, questioning the racial distortions of the booster economy.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

This chapter revolves around cultures of the novel: When, how, and why did the novel, a genre without deep roots in African cultures and literary traditions, come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? Arriving late in the colonial period, the novel created new parameters for the African imagination and provided an opening for thinking about colonial modernity and its postcolonial consequences. The chapter discusses how the social functions of the novel came to be defined by two ostensibly contradictory functions. Through the invocation of realism, the novel would be celebrated as the medium of representing what were assumed to be the realities of African history, life, and subjectivity deracinated by colonial violence or misrepresented by colonialist fiction and criticism. At the same time, romantic tropes would be deployed to imagine alternative worlds and to promote the ideals of decolonization. Realism and romance would be wedded to invent national communities as counterpoints to colonial domination.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how Langland’s use of personification allegory, romance tropes, and alliterative verse develops Lady Church as a theologically robust yet devotionally accessible being in Piers Plowman. The chapter argues that Piers Plowman presents Lady Church as a preexistent being who assumes a series of incarnate forms and depicts religious maturation and ecclesiastical reform as a transformed relationship with Lady Church, from dependence on the Church as a maternal figure to a pursuit of her as a promiscuous yet demanding romance heroine.

The period between 1500 and 1700 is sometimes associated with a dip in Arthur’s popularity. In fact, this was a time of Arthurian reinvention, rather than decline: if Arthur did not appear quite as frequently, his appearances nevertheless reached a new peak in terms of their creativity and variety. Increased scepticism surrounding Arthur had a freeing effect, allowing him to be invoked in new and different contexts, from satire to archery shows, and pre-existing Arthurian narratives and geographies were revised. Perhaps unexpectedly, Arthur’s diversification seems to have peaked during the years when Arthur’s narrative was the most potentially dangerous, such as England’s Interregnum and the early Restoration years. At the same time, popular medieval Arthuriana continued to be consumed in manuscript and print; and many local Arthurian traditions were first recorded and brought to wider knowledge during these years.

he route “from Romance to Mélodie” is used to imply a significant development in French “art song”, from simplicity to a sophistication equivalent to the German Lied. There is, however, no simple replacement of one by the other: the genres, in so far as they are distinct at all, actually overlap. Works titled “Romance” by Martini, Niedermeyer, Monpou, and Berlioz could be considered as mélodies avant la lettre. The word appears prominently in Berlioz’s published collection, the Mélodies irlandaises (1830). He had already shown a predisposition for variation in settings that, like Romances, are essentially strophic, and this tendency continued, for instance in “Villanelle”, the first song in Les Nuits d’été. Through-composed compositions appear among his earliest published songs, in the 1830 set, and in Les Nuits d’été which, although composed for voice and piano, has some claim to be considered the first orchestral song-cycle.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

This chapter offers a brief overview of patterns in approach, tone, theme and characterisation in North American engagements with the Arthurian legend since 1900. It considers retellings of the medieval romance and historiographic traditions alongside adaptations in multiple modes and media that are not especially interested in the earliest iterations of Arthur’s story. Paying particular attention to the perspectives from which these texts are told, the chapter considers how the diverse nature of these reimaginings challenges audiences to consider what exactly makes a text Arthurian while also acknowledging that the legend’s flexibility is central to its enduring popularity.

The focus is on four important and prolific figures in the mélodie repertoire: Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.  The mid-nineteenth century mélodie emerged in close association with the romance and in response to the impact of the German Lied on the French scene.  Gounod was a key figure in this development, cultivating a new style through flexible shaping of melodic lines within symmetrical phrases.  Saint-Saëns followed closely in these footsteps, with more elaborate piano writing and looser phrase structure.  Bizet and Massenet did as well, injecting greater theatrical flair and a larger harmonic palette.  That Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet all began their careers perceived as progressives and ended as musical conservatives accounts in part for their eclipse by the generation of mélodie composers born after 1850, notwithstanding a repertory of over 700 mélodies that contains many pearls.

Tennyson is the dominant figure in English-language versions of the Arthur story in this period, but this chapter focuses on the tradition outside of the Idylls. By the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign the Arthurian legend was not as fixed as it would be by the end of the century. Malory’s version of the story was not as dominant as Tennyson would make it. This chapter traces the way the legend was presented by such writers as Reginald Heber, Edward Bulwer Lytton, the young William Morris, R. S. Hawker and Algernon Swinburne. The chapter also considers the way in which Arthur was evaluated as a possible historical figure, looking at Arthurian scholarship as it developed through the century in the hands of such figures as Sharon Turner through to Frederick Furnivall and Thomas Wright, to Jessie L. Weston. It concludes by looking at the entry of the legend into versions for children, with a brief nod to the future of Arthur in the cinema.