A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.

Surveying a range of literary texts written in the vernacular languages of medieval Britain, this chapter is concerned with the ways in which the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales defined themselves in opposition to the dominant state power of England. Countering the Latin historical tradition which positioned British history as English history, writers working in Irish, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh constructed origin myths and literary traditions that worked to build local communities and regional identities. Though the territories clustered around England were far from united in their political structures, they came together as peoples to resist the imperial ambitions of the English state.

This chapter puts world literature and African print cultures into conversation by exploring a widely circulating tale of desire, deception and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The Palm-Wine Drinkard brought the folktale known as the ‘complete gentleman’ story to an international audience in 1952, but the scale of this narrative phenomenon was already massive. Since 1860, more than 450 versions have been printed in over a hundred languages across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The story also inspired dozens of adaptations across a variety of media, including many by renowned creative writers. This chapter explores what this traveling tale can teach the study of world literatures and African print cultures. It includes an overview of the phenomenon, a discussion of methodology, and an analysis of adaptations by Amos Tutuọla, Efua Sutherland and Ousmane Socé.

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.