This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in a provocative examination of how our legal regime governing creative production unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies – Harvard’s slave daguerreotypes, celebrity sex tapes, famous Wall Street statues, beloved musicals, and dictator copyrights – the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key rules governing copyrights – from the authorship, derivative rights, and fair use doctrines to copyright’s First Amendment immunity – systematically disadvantage individuals from traditionally marginalized communities. Since laws regulating the use of creative content increasingly mediate participation and privilege in the digital world, The Secret Life of Copyright provides a template for a more robust copyright system that better addresses egalitarian concerns and serves the interests of creativity.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

This chapter explores the significance of class and gender for the landscape of genius. While laboring-class and women authors were often celebrated for their genius, that genius was almost always defined and delimited by their specific social identities rather than becoming associated with nature or the nation in general. As a result, landscapes of genius rarely formed around such authors. The English laboring-class poet, John Clare, thus failed to generate a literary landscape despite his strong identification with nature and local place. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and wider identification with Scottish nature and identity, by contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and produced the “Land of Burns” as an early prototype of the landscape of genius. The chapter concludes by exploring the intersection of class and gender. It engages with the English laboring-class women poet, Ann Yearsley, whose proud self-assertion of independent genius precluded her identification with nature; and the genteel American women writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who presented herself in Rural Hours (1850) in a social and domestic relation to nature that deliberately dissociated her from any claims to genius or a landscape of genius.

This chapter discusses the overrepresentation of Malaysian Indians convicted of drug trafficking under section 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1980 on death row. Using Eric Mitnick’s group-differentiated rights theory (1999, 2000, and 2006), it is argued that Malaysian Indians convicted of drug trafficking fall into two ‘non-rights bearer’ groups: first, as members of the Malaysian Indian ethnic minority from the lower social class who have been disregarded by the 1970 socioeconomic policy and 1990 national development policy; and second, as drug couriers who have been denied fair trial rights in the Malaysian criminal justice system. As ‘non-rights bearers,’ they have suffered from disadvantages meted out by various national laws and policies, and have been victims of neglect due to the politics of race in Malaysia and the war on drugs in Southeast Asia.

This chapter describes the critical and speculative capacities of the Occupy novel, or contemporary novels that represent Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more broadly. It argues that such fiction represents the financialization of everyday life, that is, the colonization of personal life and political subjectivity by Wall Street or finance capital. In doing so, it returns the question of social class to the center of US political debates. However, the Occupy novel also speculates on the possibilities of postcapitalist social life; it treats Occupy Wall Street as prefiguring new kinds of economic relations and social conducts. The chapter frames the Occupy novel in terms of its predecessor, the fiction of the post-2008 financial recession (“crunch lit”). Whereas crunch lit diagnoses financialization as a problem of households (personal debt, family crisis, and so on), the Occupy novel asks whether literature (and art in general) might have the capacity to engage in social struggle, to imagine new forms of public life.

This chapter examines gender and sexuality in the writings of Sean O’Casey, through analysis of three works that demonstrate his preoccupation with the way women’s sexuality intersects with money, class, and sex work. As well as examining The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its reception, the chapter analyses two of his lesser-studied works – the short story ‘The Job’, and the prose poem ‘Gold and Silver Will Not Do’ from Windfalls (1934) – and the chapter highlights certain connections between the short-story writing and Eileen O’Casey’s personal experiences.

This chapter concerns the situation of Jewish families, focusing on physical and emotional experiences and reflecting on elements of daily life. It emphasizes familial roles, hierarchies, and relations: between spouses, among children, and between children and parents. It tracks the phenomena of family solidarity and family atomization.

Whereas other chapters in this volume integrate gender perspectives, this chapter argues that gender is a key lens for understanding Jewish experiences in the Holocaust. Across Europe, in Jewish communities vastly different in terms of size and religious mores, gender roles and gender ideals affected access to information, escape trajectories, and survival strategies.

Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

This chapter argues that by the latter half of the nineteenth century, priests, bishops, and other religious had immense latitude within the diffuse structures of the Church not only to raise money by different means but also to act as the central financial administrator and expert within their own parishes, dioceses, and religious houses, and that this power gave them an influential role in shaping the wider economic culture of Catholic Ireland in the period under review. It first explores levels of accounting and financial management knowledge among clergy and then situates their economic activity, including managing of debt and investments, within a wider transactional framework with wealthy and professional lay Catholics. It finally analyses how clergy were frequently afforded a significant role as arbiters of financial disputes and stewards of financial resources by the laity.