Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

The treatment of Rome and its history in Ennius’ Annales has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work has shown well that the epic sets the city at the centre of a widening Roman world, thereby making it a cosmic hub of space and time. Such epic transformations also transform perspectives on the past and the present. What of Rome in the rest of Ennius’ wide-ranging literary output? How does the tri- or quadrilingual former Rudian approach his new unelected home and its socio-cultural practices in genres beyond epic? Taking into consideration the representation of (urban) space, monuments, social practices (especially ritual acts, praise, and elite self-presentation), and intersectional conceptions of Roman identity, this chapter examines the ways in which Ennius’ writings construct and reflect Rome qua city and set of cultural values and perspectives. The Scipio, Ambracia, and Sabinae anchor the chapter, but the contribution also uncovers key themes in less expected places, with some comment on the epigrams, Hedyphagetica, and philosophical works.

Against received opinion, this chapter argues that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within Varro’s Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project. Particular attention is paid to Varro’s Bimarcus, in which a “new” fragment of Ennius’ Saturae is tentatively discovered.

This chapter investigates the diction of the fragments attributed to Ennius’ Saturae by ancient sources and conjecturally by modern editors. While thirty or so transmitted lines naturally do not permit one to paint a conclusive picture of Ennius’ experiment, a little more can be said about the relationship between his Saturae and those of Lucilius, and ultimately about Ennius’ role in the introduction of personal poetry at Rome. Monologic and dialogic utterances and the mixture of metres (iambo-trochaic, hexameter, Sotadean) and registers (comic, informal, mock-epic) will be discussed, using Lucilius as a comparandum. Attention is paid to “early” features of language and style, with reference to Ennius’ diction in his epic and dramatic works.

This chapter offers a brief biography of Sloane, beginning with a reflection on his currently unstable position within the institutions he helped found due to his investment in the transatlantic slave trade. The chapter explores his contemporary reception as a learned man of science who held an important role in the Royal Society of London as secretary, as well as the satirical portrayals of Sloane as a undiscerning omnivore. The chapter offers close literary attention to William King’s pamphlet The Transactioneer. It then moves on to give a history and overview of Sloane’s collecting habits, including an overview of their scope, and finally offers a detailed analysis of the two main tools used to navigate the project: Sloane’s own catalogues and the British Library’s digital reconstruction of his collections.

This chapter engages Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25), which satirizes conventionally nostalgic images like childhood, courtship, and the English countryside, and is therefore usually read as anti-nostalgic. Nevertheless, Loy’s autobiographical poem returns nostalgically to moments of personal illumination experienced by the young artist and her immigrant father. These insights, into one’s inner nature and into the depths of the cosmos, ground the poem’s cultural critique. Like Joyce, Loy complicates the notion of national heritage, demanding that readers re-evaluate what it means to be English, even as she weaves nostalgia into a poem largely negative towards the past.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

This chapter argues that Ennius began his epic poem, the Annales, by boasting about his non-epic literary accomplishments, in particular his Saturae. It proceeds to corroborate this view by demonstrating that Ennius’ non-epic and non-tragic corpus – his Saturae, Sacra historia, Scipio, Sota, Epicharmus, and Hedyphagetica – continued to be read and engaged with by important Latin figures (e.g., Terence, Virgil, Apuleius, Lactantius) for hundreds of years. Multiplicity was key, therefore, both to Ennius’ self-representation and to his long Roman reception.

This chapter investigates the penal colony in Australia as a radical extension of European systems of social discipline and moral transformation. It considers how poets in colonial Australia faced a multitude of tasks, including the adaptation of British literary cultures to new territories, developing a sense of colonial belonging, taking imaginary possession of Indigenous lands, and also occasionally expressing ambivalence to Indigenous dispossession. The chapter discusses how poets responded to early administrative structures, with many engaging with a satiric form known as pipes that circulated clandestinely. While some poetry embraced a more ironised and alienated poetics, other poetry such as Michael Massey Robinson’s odes reinforced a Virgil-influenced alignment of land cultivation and moral improvement. The chapter then considers Barron Field’s nation-building use of poetry and the relationship between poetry and promotion of the unwritten doctrine of terra nullius.

This chapter makes the case for a genealogical, periodical-centred approach to the study of African literature. It argues that the overlooked genre of the newspaper column provided a convivial space for literary experimentation and the generation of alternative literary forms in colonial African contexts. In particular, it highlights the emergence in the periodical press of satirical street literature, a genre that takes African street life as its subject matter and registers its unique dynamics in aesthetic form. Reading two influential examples – R. R. R. Dhlomo’s ‘Roamer’ column and Alex La Guma’s ‘Up my Alley’ – this chapter argues that periodical street literature can be understood as an alternative mode of literary world-making in relation to dominant teleologies and narrative templates. The chapter asks how the inclusion of this ephemeral literary archive reframes understandings of Black city writing in colonial contexts and traces a possible genealogy of afterlives and echoes in the wider world of letters

This chapter examines the relationship between English satire and libel law between roughly 1670 and 1730. It takes up the growth of verbal ambiguity and the use of irony, circumlocution, and allegory among satirists such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Delarivier Manley, and demonstrates how the courts responded to verbal ambiguity by refining the supposedly “objective” interpretive standards to be used by jurors. Such standards created mechanisms for delimiting verbal ambiguity and restricting the interpretive latitude of jurors while permitting the crown to skirt technical linguistic issues. These revisions to the law were part of a more general refinement of libel laws, which furnished the government with its primary means of regulating the press during this period. The interaction between libel law and satire had consequences for both legal procedure and literature – consequences that extended well beyond the eighteenth century and that continue to shape legal and literary practice today.

Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

This chapter touches on three moments in Modern Hebrew realist literature. The earliest is the late nineteenth century, in which Modern Hebrew was first widely read. Focusing on S. Y. Abramovich’s “In the Secret Place of Thunder,” I argue that the novella’s formal clash between realist and religious social worlds constitutes an attempt to think through the uneven capitalist development of Eastern European Jewish towns in the period. I then turn to Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel, He Walked through the Fields, a novel paradigmatic in the development of narrative interiority in Hebrew realism. I argue that interiority is invented in order to retain the historical perception of a reality that has gone into crisis. The last text is Avivit Mishmari’s 2013 satirical novel The Old Man Lost His Mind. I argue that the novel should be read against its postmodern predecessors, which registered the terminal crisis of older national-hegemonic historicity. In Mishmari’s novel new developments in Israeli capitalist social form – the advent of anti-liberal capitalism alongside older neoliberal sensibilities – are allegorically juxtaposed to one another, in an effort to restart the Israeli historical imagination.