This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

This chapter concludes by revisiting the importance of genre assessment. The wilderness narrative is not history, but this does not mean it has no historicity. As political allegory that became ever more generically complex, it is deeply implicated in Israel’s history. The literary history that emerged from readings of the complaint episodes is summarized here; it entails a pseudo-biographical version, an annalistic version, a tragic version, a hierocratic version, and a prophetic version. This preliminary literary history should be viewed as a map to guide readings of other texts, not a model to be imposed on them. The result is a history of political thought in action.

This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

Both Collingwood and Wittgenstein link philosophy with poetry. Collinwood thought that “good philosophy and good poetry are not two different kinds of writing, but one,” while Wittgenstein wrote that “philosophy ought to be written only as a poetic composition.” In this chapter, I present what these two philosophers say about the relation between philosophy and poetry and argue that, their differences notwithstanding, both want philosophers to express their times, just like poets, and lead their audience to the future in a process of self-knowledge and reform. Finally, I comment on Richard Rorty’s remarks on the relation between philosophy and poetry. I argue that, unlike Collingwood and Wittgenstein, Rorty wants poetry to replace, and perhaps even eliminate, philosophy, but agrees with them and Nietzsche that poets ought to act as prophets, not in the sense of foretellers, but in the sense of inspiring leaders and groundbreakers.

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

What is literary data? This chapter addresses this question by examining how the concept of data functioned during a formative moment in academic literary study around the turn of the twentieth century and again at the beginning of electronic literary computing. The chapter considers the following cases: Lucius Adelno Sherman’s Analytics of Literature (1893), the activities of the Concordance Society (c.1906–28), Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (1911), and the work of Stephen M. Parrish c.1960. The chapter explains how the concept of literary data was used by literature scholars to signal a commitment to a certain epistemological framework that was opposed to other ways of knowing and reading in the disciplinary field.

In this chapter, I show how the urge to monumentalize the book-bound novel in the face of cultural and technological transformations inspires a range of strategies to make literature anew. Starting from contested notions of the “end of the book” and then examining several “renaissances,” I explore the resilience of paper-based literature in the era of its foretold death. First, I examine how comparative literary studies has responded to the shift from analog to digital by developing new frameworks and critical tools. Then, I zoom in on recent innovations in, and reinventions of, analogue literary practices, in book art and book design as well as literary fiction. I end with a reflection on a specific form of bookishness that emphasizes the novel’s size and scale, and thus reinvents it as monumental. On all these levels, we will see, the digital has brought the book, and the novel as the literary art form bound by the book, into sharper focus.

While it is important to be able to read and interpret individual papers, the results of a single study are never going to provide the complete answer to a question. To move towards this, we need to review the literature more widely. There can be a number of reasons for doing this, some of which require a more comprehensive approach than others. If the aim is simply to increase our personal understanding of a new area, then a few papers might provide adequate background material. Traditional narrative reviews have value for exploring areas of uncertainty or novelty but give less emphasis to complete coverage of the literature and tend to be more qualitative, so it is harder to scrutinise them for flaws. Scoping reviews are more systematic but still exploratory. They are conducted to identify the breadth of evidence available on a particular topic, clarify key concepts and identify the knowledge gaps. In contrast, a major decision regarding policy or practice should be based on a systematic review and perhaps a meta-analysis of all the relevant literature, and it is this approach that we focus on here.

The Conclusion draws together the themes of the book, and expands on how the foregoing discussions of art relate to ordinary life and love. Expanding the categories of ‘finding’ and ‘making’ by that of ‘receiving’, it sketches a constructive vision of the theological imagination.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.