This chapter examines how Faulkner uses the trope of parchment skin in his 1932 novel Light in August to describe his racially ambiguous protagonist Joe Christmas who becomes marked as Black through a range of media forms including magazines, Bibles, blackboards, and a Kodak print. While Faulkner can be patronizing in his depictions of writing by African American characters, the use of African drumming in his story “Red Leaves” (1930) to communicate over long distances in an earlier form of writing-at-a-distance that we find in telegraphy exemplifies powerful kinds of communication by Black characters. The chapter shows how Faulkner reworks the issue of race and writing materials in Intruder in the Dust (1948), refiguring the white pencil of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in his fictional town of Jefferson into the white pencil of a flashlight beam that portends racial change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of writing by American Indian characters that range from lampoons to meditations on genre where Native literacy undercuts romantic stereotypes.

focuses on longer-term life planning and the role of learning involved in it, drawing specifically on the work of the macroeconomist Robert Lucas. Taking one ethnographic example from Taiwan, the author asks questions about Lucas’s account of human capital, examining among other things questions about fate in economic life and processes of modernisation in seemingly traditional societies.

This chapter argues that Arthur Murphy’s tragic dramaturgy is more radical than has been recognised, notably in its treatment of the classic Enlightenment concerns with religious toleration and the ‘savage’ or indigenous critique of colonial invasion. Murphy’s serious plays are Drydenic in spatial reach, stretching from East Asia (The Orphan of China [1759]) to Peru (Alzuma [1757/1773]) via Syria (Zenobia [1768]) and Greece (The Grecian Daughter [1772]). Murphy’s imperial dramaturgy swerves from his predecessor’s, however, in focusing on female protagonists and reiterating indigenous or non-European literary historical accounts of colonial conquest and resistance. Contextualising Murphy’s tragic writing via his Irish and Catholic origins (partially subsumed by his later metropolitan British and Anglican affiliations), this chapter explores Alzuma’s reiteration of Voltaire’s and Hill’s Alzire/Alzuma, themselves redactions of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of Peru. Noting how Murphy’s profound attachment to his devoutly Catholic mother informs his critique of forced conversion, Orr shows how his dramatisation of the black legend topos is linked to other Irish Patriot uses of this trope, by radical politician Charles Lucas and by well-known Patriot author Henry Brooke, in the latter’s Montezuma [undated].

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.