Part 1: Eliza Haywood’s oriental romance Eovaai reworks the trope of being “carried away” as an undisciplined way of inhabiting a world organized around reproducing patriarchal power and masculine dignity. Haywood evokes the classical fascinum, or winged penis, to confront readers with a spectacle of the materiality of heteropatriarchal world-making. Tracing Haywood’s fascinum back to earlier iterations from the medieval and early modern periods, as well as forward to psychoanalytic and phenomenological treatments, this book considers the possibilities of fascination as a paracritical mode of attention. The anamorphic describes a mode of representation that resists resolution into something straightforwardly comprehensible, thereby withholding from the subject who views it the steadying ground of epistemological certainty. Eovaai presents an irreverent celebration of bodies that choose flight over fixity, vulnerability over legibility, and transformative potential over ideological coherence. As such, it ushers readers into unexpected encounters with our own epistemological capacities as dynamically embodied creatures.

‘Hannibal’s legacy’ is an influential 1965 book by a controversial historian, Arnold Toynbee. It set the agenda for the next half-century and more of scholarship by arguing that the ‘legacy’ consisted of lasting damage to the agricultural economy of Italy and the political stability of Rome. Its contemporary reception is presented and analysed. The (disputed) extent of Italy’s devastation, as divinely promised to Hannibal in an alleged dream while still in Iberia, is assessed, and manpower difficulties discussed. Hannibal’s legacy at defeated Carthage was more obviously damaging, though the city did not fall until 146. Hannibal’s literary legacy in Latin and Greek literature was systematically ambiguous: fear, horror, fascination, and even admiration. Scipio’s literary afterlife and perceived qualities are explored initially through the medium of the ‘Dream of Scipio’, a fictional work by Cicero in imitation of Plato: Scipio Africanus appears to his adoptive grandson Aemilianus in his sleep.

This chapter explores how cleaners experience and approach dirt. Dirt plays a pivotal role in their everyday work life. It matters not just symbolically but also in its very materiality. Working with dirt can feel cyclical, frustrating, painful and futile. It can threaten cleaners’ health, safety and their dignity. At the same time, cleaners also find in their work opportunities for earning an honest living, a sense of satisfaction and the respect of others. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when turning dirty spaces into clean ones. Working with dirt can allow for liberties, providing cleaners with a sense of autonomy. As much as dirt can disgust, it also fascinates cleaners. The pursuit of dirt can make their work exciting, fun, and even hot. All this shows how treating dirt as merely a source of shame, a common assumption in academia and public, does not do justice to cleaners’ lived experiences. This assumption risks reinforcing a stigma and deny that cleaners can approach what they do with both interest and motivation. Whereas dirt plays a significant, even starring role in the cleaners’ workplace dramas of dignity, it is but only one of many.