Before the twentieth century, to be literate in the Western Sahel meant to be literate in Arabic—or in other African languages written with the Arabic script. Yet works by West African Muslim scholars, composed largely in Arabic, are often overlooked in discussions of West African literature. This chapter highlights this gap by reconstructing the history of the region’s ‘Islamic literature’ and its relationship to print. Focusing on the literary production of two of the region’s major Sufi orders, the Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, it shows that printed works of Islamic erudition became increasingly important elements of public life across the twentieth century and continued to serve as one of the most frequent and readily available means of experiencing ‘literature’, even alongside the expansion of colonial and postcolonial educational institutions that employed European languages of instruction. Comprising some of the most common forms of reading material in West Africa today, they are the fruit of an encounter between a well-established Sufi literary tradition and newfound access to the affordances of print.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter addresses the diverse modes in which poetry is found in and around Bloomsbury by focusing on three different aspects. First, it charts the presence of poetry and poets across different Hogarth Press series (the Hogarth Essays, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, and Hogarth Living Poets). Second, it considers poetry both as a genre and as a critical issue in the debate on form in art, for example in Woolf’s numerous essays on prose and on the novel, in which her discourse on the subject is inextricably linked to her reflections on poetry, or in the work of Roger Fry, Charles Mauron, and Julian Bell on Mallarmé. Third, it focuses on Julian Bell’s practice of and critical discourse on poetry as they develop in crucial moments for the Bloomsbury group more at large. By addressing these points, the chapter outlines a network of people across generations whose discourse on, or writing of, poetry intersected in one way or another with the cultural and aesthetic practices of the group, thus illuminating some of the fertile tensions and contradictions within it.

Throughout the third Critique Kant repeatedly stresses the importance of communication for human sociability, but he does not link communication to any particular view of language, making it uncertain how he thought of it and its importance for our cognition, rationality, and ethical sensibility. Against such uncertainty, my aim here is to show that there is at least one important form of linguistic expression – the poetic one – that is of paramount importance for Kant’s overall view of humanity’s progress towards the kingdom of ends. In developing my account, I start by explicating the importance of communication in Kant’s overall system, and I then focus on poetic expression, understood as a particular kind of communication. The emerging view of the centrality of the particular poetic expression generated by genius grounds Kant’s aesthetic cognitivism and brings to the fore the two main functions of poetic expression: the one related to development of human cognitive and moral capacities, and the one related to the role of poetry, and aesthetic judgments regarding poetry, in promoting our humanity.

The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

Chapter 6 situates John Milton’s major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes – in relation to abiding conflicts over fiscal policy prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton was actively critical of the Commonwealth’s management of fiscal policy and voiced his fear about the fiscal impact of a restored monarchy. Though fiscal concerns are largely occluded from his poetry, Milton’s depiction of war and its effects continues this critique by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of security imaginaries organized around the violently expansive accumulation of wealth. Milton’s metasecurity dilemma arises in his poetry as a question about how to value people and circumstances correctly, about the relevant criteria to use to orient oneself ethically and politically within catastrophic realities. His poems thus highlight Milton’s deep uncertainty about how to define safety or about what kinds of collective security might be possible in such a disoriented moment.

This chapter argues that rap has been undervalued by English studies. It conducts a close analysis of the work of Roots Manuva to develop a nuanced account of how his rap songs engage with contemporary human experience, and to demonstrate how literary critics might respond to them. It draws on the work of Jaques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben to examine the literary singularity of Roots Manuva’s third album Awfully Deep. Rodney Smith can be seen to play with with forms of temporality, the tension and difference between sound and sense, and understandings of the self in a digitally mediated world. The chapter proposes that by drawing on the concept of the semiotic-performative alongside that of the semantic and semiotic-poetic, students of English literature might be better able to engage with the significance of Smith’s oeuvre.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

This chapter examines the work of three contemporary US poets – Daniel Borzutzky, Rosa Alcalá, and Wendy W. Walters – who explore how capitalist processes help to construct and “translate” race and gender into partitioned conditions of subjectivation and what Iris Marion Young, after Jean-Paul Sartre, calls serial collective identities. All three authors help us to reimagine the political economy of race in terms of bounded yet globally interconnected material contexts of action rather than as relations between collective subjects with fixed group attributes. These poets instead represent race as a social form of constraint and possibility powerfully conditioned by a capitalist logic of accumulation, spatial containment, and an international division of labor simultaneously dividing and connecting populations across great distances and differences.

At the time of his death in 1964, Sean O’Casey left a substantial body of disparate writings. His poetry, journalism, short stories, diaries, and his history of the Irish Citizen Army have received scant scholarly attention, but give us important clues about his literary development and his debt to other writers. This chapter examines some of these diverse writings to show how O’Casey experimented with a number of different forms. It also shows how O’Casey remained committed to writing in different genres throughout his life, and the chapter reveals some of the literary touchstones that would inform his non-theatrical writings.

This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

For all intents and purposes, life was good for Karen: happily married and settled with three children and a nice life. A series of events -- including bereavement; a large, organised fraud involving threats, police involvement and a court case; and the sudden severe ill health of her husband -- sent her down a deep hole. Major depression and anxiety opened boxes that were closed many years ago containing trauma that was never disclosed and everything collapsed. PTSD added to the deep despair and there were numerous episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts. Six years of repeated admissions (mostly involuntary) followed, being treated with medications and four courses of ECT. ECT was instrumental in Karen being well enough to be able to engage with the therapy she needed for long-term recovery. The story is narrated with original diary extracts and poems written at the time of her suffering. Karen now works with the ECT Accreditation scheme, reviewing ECT clinics around the country, and has spoken extensively about her experiences to journalists and at conferences, trying to reduce the stigma that surrounds the treatment. She is also employed in the clinic where she received treatment as a peer support worker

Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

What little we know about the Latin author Commodian comes directly from his own poems – the Instructions and the Apologetic Poem (also known as the Poem about Two Peoples). Gennadius (On Illustrious Men 15) mentions him but relies on Commodian’s poems just as we do. Commodian was most likely writing in North Africa, probably Carthage, in the third quarter of the third century. He has a deep affinity for and familiarity with Cyprian, and was likely a direct contemporary, though it appears he himself never held ecclesial office. Commodian seems to have been a layperson whose own journey from “frequenting the [pagan] temples” (1, 1.5) to becoming a “Law-inspired” – that is, “scripture-inspired” – Christian (1, 1.6) prompted him to make his own efforts to influence his various communities in Carthage. It seems likely that he identified as ethnically Syrian (hence the final poem’s title, where the author of the Instructions identifies himself as “the man from Gaza”), and that, prior to his time in Carthage, he spent substantial formative years in Aquileia.