Focusing on the proliferation of independent African-owned presses in eastern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter discusses the popular pamphlets known as Onitsha market literature. The chapter asks how the upsurge in local publishing shaped readers’ ideas about literary languages and contributed to authors’ social prestige as intellectuals. The chapter describes the practicalities of pamphlet production, as well as the ways pamphleteers offered fresh conceptualisations of literary inspiration outside dominant western frameworks for works of the imagination.

This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.

Towards the end of his life, and at the height of his fame, Joseph Haydn composed two oratorios based on libretti by Baron Gottfried van Swieten. The Creation (1798) has enjoyed a continual life in the concert hall and has produced one of the most unwieldy bibliographies in Haydn scholarship. However, Haydn’s The Seasons (1801) has had no such luck. Many factors have contributed to its neglect, central among them a lingering belief that The Seasons suffers from a poor libretto and lacks the musical insight and innovation of the earlier oratorio. Scholarship on The Seasons remains minimal, and is often, though not uniformly, characterised by analytical musical discussion rather than critical analyses of how the oratorio responds to cultural and artistic phenomena of the eighteenth century.

Nathalie Carnes takes a fine selection of concrete examples from different times and cultures to show that material objects, icons, images, and art can be a natural extension of Christian worship. Through the incarnation and its continuation, they can carry a set of meanings that enhance and clarify the liturgy and make it a sensory reality in complementary ways.

Building on research into US government archives, Pahlavi propaganda texts, Islamist sermons, and print media from US allies, including Iran’s common comparand, Türkiye, this chapter demonstrates how State Department officials, CIA researchers, and public intellectuals used representations of Empress Farah to link beauty to modernization theory and mobilized comparative critiques of both on aesthetic grounds. Examining these depictions alongside the Empress’s own views on her appearance and political role offers new insights into the gendered limits of nation-branding and soft power.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

Literary modernism cognitivizes the gothic by engaging the counter-conversionary energies that James associated with the sick-soul’s awareness of the human potential for evil. Where psychological commentary on the First World War’s aftermath typically concerns “shell-shock,” this chapter highlights the period’s equal investment in the cognitively rehabilitative potentialities of modernist “techniques of dissociation” to disrupt dangerous excesses of affect and forestall identification with fascistic beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), demonstrate how the various information streams—song lyrics, social commentary, and newspaper publicity—haunt their protagonists, producing self-estranging varieties of dissociation characteristic of the Jamesean sick soul, wherein soul-sickness indicates both a recognition of and resistance to dehumanizing beliefs.

Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.

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 explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.

Chapter 10 returns to broader issues of the cultural politics of metaphor, examining the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in illness experience and healing. While the focus on language allows us to mobilize the richness of literature to explore illness experience, in doing so we may inadvertently downplay the material circumstances that determine health disparities and inequities. Against this apparent opposition, I argue that attention to the aesthetics of language and the creative functions of imagination and poeisis can help us understand the mechanisms of suffering and affliction and devise forms of healing that better respond to the needs of individuals within and across diverse cultures and contexts. Every choice of metaphor draws from and points toward a form of life. The critique of metaphors that begins with an appreciation of the qualities they confer on experience, and then moves out into the social world to identify ways that systems and structures are configured, rationalized, and maintained. A critical poetics of illness and healing can contribute to efforts to improve our institutions and achieve greater equity not only by recognizing and respecting difference and diversity but also by engaging with the particulars of each person’s experience.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

The aesthetics of the sublime, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, has frequently been seen as part of a process of secularization: What is “absolutely great” now becomes the object of an aesthetic experience that need have no reference to the divine or to religion. Kant in particular has been accorded a key role in the development of a modern aesthetics that establishes the autonomy of art and of the aesthetic vis-à-vis both religion and politics. Setting out from a seldom-read passage in Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” on the power of the sublime to liberate the imagination from tutelage by the church and by the state, this chapter traces the intimate connection in Kant’s text between religion, political emancipation, and the sublime in order to challenge widely shared if frequently unstated assumptions about the secular status of the sublime and of Kantian aesthetics more broadly. The sublime emerges as power that resists containment within the modern divisions between politics, religion, and aesthetics. In the process, Kant’s text is read as providing an implicit critique of the logic of secularism avant la lettre.

This essay examines the literary interchange between Percy Shelley and John Keats through a comparative reading of their poems, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘To Autumn’, both of which were written in explicit (Shelley) or implicit (Keats) response to the Peterloo Massacre. Drawing special attention to the formal and stylistic differences between these two poets, I argue that each demonstrates a distinctive attitude towards argument. More particularly, I suggest that Keats and Shelley are uniquely interested in the question of whether or not a poem can make a political claim and, more broadly, in the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

The first chapter sets out the stakes of Auerbach’s understanding of Renaissance art by beginning with “The Philology of World Literature” and ending with Henry James’ sentimental tourist in Venice. To be a sentimental tourist is to live an aesthetic life in history, and this chapter uses this point to sketch out a portrait of Auerbach’s work that emerges from a stress on Renaissance.