This chapter outlines the history of previous institutions that created forms of capital in Europe, including land, dowries, banks, bills of exchange, and government debt. It examines the reasons why the system of informal oral credit, as it had developed over the previous 100-odd years, began to be criticised during the Commonwealth period. Many authors started to claim that it was both inefficient and an obstacle to economic growth. Many pamphlets were published containing proposals of different sorts of banks, which would issue paper currency to speed up circulation. Some of these were based on previous European examples. The nature of these proposals is examined, together with a summary of how they related to the creation of the Bank of England. Its establishment is normally seen as the successful outcome of this debate, but in fact it was not primarily created as an institution to expand the supply of credit, but to help fund the government debt. The increasing cost of the War of Spanish Succession did, however, result in the issue of things like Exchequer or Treasury bills, as well as South Sea and Bank stock to fund the war. The last part of the chapter focuses on the significant effect these multiple forms of paper currency had on liquidity within London.

This chapter introduces what I call the ‘predictive turn,’ in which cognitive processes traditionally described in terms of remembering the past are reoriented to face the future. Here, the first-order topic is the phenomenology of reading literary texts, including the emotions of surprise and interest, the senses of agency and presence, and the feelings of immersion and flow, whereas the second-order method triangulates among insights gained from theoretical cognitive neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. The first part explains how aspects of perception can be understood in terms of prediction, prediction errors, and the management of precision, or the evolving confidence that we place in our predictions, including those related to unfolding stories and their narration. The second part unpacks the relationship between memory and prediction, including revisiting the cognitivist concept of the schema and how it can be applied to literary intertextuality. The third part clarifies how predictive processing is related to movement, grounded language, and active inference, in which perceptual and motor systems work together to reduce prediction error. For literary texts, this might entail attending to the use of grounded or ‘embodied’ language (Kukkonen 2020), among other possibilities such as feelings of estrangement and narrative foregrounding.

The book’s introduction outlines its ambition to read literature as a variety of cartography, and presents a technical vocabulary for grasping literature’s role in the changing geo-epistemology of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring Langston Hughes’s creation of literary maps, and introduces the concept of "counter-mapping," a practice of producing knowledge that challenges official geographies. It then sets out to reexamine modernism’s connection to technology by arguing that the spatial ramifications of media and transit technologies imbued early twentieth-century writing with a unique geotechnical aesthetic. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the book aims to map this geotechnical aesthetic across a range of authors from across the dominion of the United States.

If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of characters and the trajectories of plots. The pursuit of whale oil, for example, motivates the events of Moby-Dick, just as ivory and opium shape those of Heart of Darkness and Sea of Poppies, respectively. Yet whether commodities appear as background details or as protagonists in their own right, their presence invites us to connect the desires and domestic intimacies detailed in the text to the wider networks of production and circulation that frame them.

Water is rarely a subject of Euro-American literary attention, even if it is one of the most essential commodities today. But this is not the case for literary studies in places such as Oceania and the Caribbean, and in our world’s moment of environmental crises the status of water as (and as not) a commodity is more important than ever. This chapter first sketches out broader trends of water’s commodification in several canonical literary texts. The chapter then examines imaginaries of transnational waters, hydro-power, and water contamination in works by Ruth Ozeki and Nnedi Okorafor. Finally, I focus on contemporary authors from Oceania who prioritise water’s critical importance as they challenge notions of it as a commodity and complicate the ‘Blue Humanities’. This chapter considers shows how fictions and poetry can creatively engage with forms of water’s commodification but also theorise alternative water futures.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

Experiences in mental illness are often highly subjective and out of the ordinary and may be difficult to describe in ordinary language. Through images, metaphors, and other literary tools, literature can facilitate understanding that would not be possible otherwise.

Portrayals of psychiatry provide important feedback for clinicians on how they are perceived by their patients and also for the public on how those with mental illness perceive their position in society. This feedback is often negative, but there are positive examples too. Patients often write about the humanity of the psychiatrist and appreciate their being versed in a range of disciplines, including art or music.

Literature is about weaving a narrative, which is an important part of recovery in psychiatry. Only in literature are we afforded more licence to use our imaginations and less bounded by the limits of reality. In literature, patients and psychiatrists can express many of their thoughts, feelings, and values that could be seen as inappropriate or ‘unprofessional’ in any other context.

Literary works can lay bare those aspects of the cultural and moral context of practice that we may not think about otherwise, including the origins of relevant societal and professional values.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

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.