Postcolonial poetry, as both a body of poems and a field of critical discourse, furnishes opportunities to foreground anticolonial and antiracist work while attending to its aesthetic dimensions. Taking a cue from Vahni Capildeo’s “In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman-Saxon Lines,” this chapter suggests that their speculative poem enacts a decolonizing practice in at least three ways that ramify throughout postcolonial poetry more broadly: (i) it questions the politicized distinctions between outsiders and insiders, (ii) it makes available for poetry undervalued forms of language and definitions of home, and (iii) it embarks on a project of world-unmaking and world-remaking. Organized according to these three modes of practice, this chapter reflects on how university-level aesthetic education and pedagogy might elucidate the decolonizing work of poets and poems. At the same time, it tests the limits of the term “postcolonial poetry” for such decolonizing work. With a focus on Jamaican poets Louise Bennett, Lorna Goodison, and Kei Miller, the chapter also looks to Natalie Diaz, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Safia Elhillo, and Tjawangwa Dema.

The curriculum has been fundamentally challenged by First Nations writers in three main ways. First is the proliferation of acclaimed fiction, poetry and drama written and performed by First Nations writers, which has become integral to curricula and the has taken root in the wider Australian imaginary. Second is the increasing presence of First Nations scholars in the literary-critical field who critique inherited practices, the values of the accepted canon, and provide diverse modes of reading and analysis. Third – and no doubt problematically – is the identification with Indigenous ontologies through the crises of the Anthropocene, which has expanded the range of courses that include First Nations literatures.Of critical importance to these transformations is the engagement of the international community including its readers and critics. The connections between First Nations communities across the globe are also vital to these processes. Closest to home, the connections within Oceania and the Pacific are driving change and a comparison of Australia with New Zealand is revealing. For while the formation of New Zealand’s literary institutions occurred later than those of Australia, their decolonization has accelerated faster and more surely. This chapter will include a comparison of these two contexts and their related projects of decolonizing literary studies.

This chapter proposes that the representation of animals in contemporary writing is best understood as “literary zoontology”: the portrayal of animal existence, and of sociality among animals and humans, as an intertwined story of the reality of more-than-human life and literary meaning. The framework adopted is principally literary-theoretical. By analyzing some key contemporary critical approaches to making sense of animal life, I argue for attention to the “animal form” of contemporary texts, in which literary animal lives are not dissected into their actual and imaginary, embodied and aesthetic, parts. The analysis then opens onto a key example: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animal form of Animal Farm configures together what are normatively understood as essentially different “kinds” of living and being: human and animal, species and individual, speculative and actual, aesthetic and real. Indeed, focusing through the lens of literary zoontology offers us new ways to discover Orwell’s literary animals within the history of human-animal relations. As such, it is one way that literary reading can take us beyond the human-animal divide.

This chapter aims to engage with decolonizing turns within the history of medicine as a set of sources and as a discipline and will consider how such readings and pedagogical choices might help us reflect upon a decolonizing turn within the English literary curriculum. Literary sources intersect seamlessly with histories of medicine, science, disability, and emotion. However, it is still possible that history and literature as complementary but starkly different methodologies rarely reflect adequately on one’s disciplinary borrowings from the other. This chapter is an attempt to facilitate such a conversation and knowledge exchange. For my purposes, I define “literature” for the historian in a way that incorporates a broader range of “creative” writing, including ethnography, memoir, psychological or psychoanalytic notetaking, and polemics.

OF THE HUNDRED chapters, or histoires, that make up L’Epistre Othea, three feature the goddess Diana (Dyane). In the Queen's Manuscript copy of this work, each histoire includes a miniature; the image in the first of the three Diana stories (histoire 23) shows a goddess wearing blue and her female followers reading from open books (Figure 12). In this representation, the status of the woman in blue as goddess is determined by her position in a cloud above her followers, a position that also denotes her preceptive role and authority. As can be gleaned from the quotation in the above epigraph, which is taken from this histoire, its theme is chastity, yet the illumination represents literacy – female literacy, more precisely. Thus “a link between literacy and chastity” is unmistakably forged between the text and image in this particular histoire. In their study of the Othea, Desmond and Sheingorn have highlighted the originality of this composition, which “has no known textual or visual source,” suggesting that it must therefore have been created on Christine's instructions. The fact that there is no antecedent for this image is significant in two ways: first, it demonstrates that Christine wanted to depict female literacy in a new and more explicit manner and thus forms a further example of original imagery in her manuscripts; second, it opens up the interpretative possibilities for the goddess-figure dressed in blue.

The previous chapter featured an in-depth analysis of the ways in which, by being depicted wearing the colour blue, an authoritative stance was created for Christine, calling to mind a variety of powerful associations, including the Virgin Mary and the qualities for which she stood, such as wisdom and peace. Since it serves to empower her, I described the costume adopted by Christine in the City of Ladies Master's illuminations as a form of “power dressing,” and described the process by which it also entails the transmission of power from the Marian figure to the author.

ON BENDED KNEE, in a richly decorated room adorned with golden fleurs-de-lys on a royal blue background, Christine de Pizan presents her book to Isabeau de Bavière, the Queen of France, whose ladies-in-waiting look on. The scene is visually striking, composed of bold colours (the bright red and blue are particularly vivid) and gold leaf, the whole enclosed within a frame of delicate filigraned decorations. Such is the exquisite dedication miniature of the manuscript now known as “The Queen's Manuscript” or “Book of the Queen,” London, British Library, Harley MS 4431 (see Figure 1 ). The size of the image further underscores its significance: uniquely among the dedication miniatures found in Christine's corpus of surviving author-manuscripts, it makes use of the full two-column width of the page. The content of the image is also remarkable for its realism: not only can the women who are present in the scene be identified with some certainty, but as Sandra Hindman has shown, rather incredibly, “it also reproduces details of dress, tapestry, and furniture that correspond with descriptions in the royal accounts.” The visual presentation has a textual counterpart, of which part is cited in the above epigraph, in which Christine emphasizes her position as donor presenting her book to a noble patron, as well as her role in preparing the manuscript's content. The text mirrors details found in the image, such as Christine coming before Isabeau holding the book in her hands in a traditional author pose. Together, the text and image found at the opening of the Queen's Manuscript form a distinctive and memorable scene.

IT IS USEFUL to begin this conclusion by recapitulating the book's primary argu-ment. In Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A, the masterful forms of Old English poetic power perform the voices of supernatural speakers, representing these as powerful speakers by aligning their discourse with the audience's intuitive sense of poetic power. Since such linguistic mastery leads to credibility and influence, we can also speak of this poetically powerful speech as influential. The poets’ (and, indeed, supernatural speak-ers’) influence can be observed not only in the fact that these poems were preserved, but also in other Old English poems which bear the marks of these antecedents’ influ-ence. While few scholars have overlooked the didactic aims of such religious poetry, the analyses presented in this book illuminate as never before our three poets’ particular artistic and didactic aims as well as the essential role of speech within those aims. For these poets all make explicit mention of the importance of keeping God's words, and in presenting these words to their audiences in such powerful and influential forms, the poets labour to guarantee their audiences will remember those words and carry out their directives. Hence, the most poetically powerful supernatural speeches are clear indications of what these poets wanted their audiences to learn.

In Genesis A, the most powerful speeches demonstrate God's power over Satan, demons, the wicked, and the material world, as well as demonstrating the results of disobedience and God's power to protect and bless those who listen to and keep his words. Here, like an ideal heroic king, God's words are equivalent to his deeds, and with these words he intervenes into this world by supernaturally calling his subject creations into order. His commands and decrees shape the obedient material order and call variable humanity into the terms of his word. Those who remain within his terms are “created” nobles, endowed with gifts, rank, and honoured lineage; those vio-lating his terms receive retribution, whether cursing, outlawry, or death. The stron-gest examples of God's poetic power, which usually coincide with hypermetrics, are predominantly speech-acts in which his word orders material or social reality in these ways. The second most poetically powerful speech in the poem is a case in point: when God curses Cain, he reviews the social expectations of what Cain should have done, then states what Cain actually did, then decrees Cain's fate as a punishment.

IN THE OLD English poem Christ C, also known as Christ in Judgment, as Jesus Christ begins his final words to those who rejected him, something remarkable happens: the poetic lines swell from two-stress verses, which are the standard Old English poetic form, into an expanded form of three stress positions, a form known as “hypermetrics” (513a–517a):

The shift to longer, hypermetric verses seems to signal that something is different about this speech, or perhaps even that something special is occurring. Three lines later, the meter returns to standard two-stress verses, but the hypermetric verses recur again and again throughout this divine speech, including in the speech's final lines. The divine judge's entire discourse is bracketed and filled by the extraordinary verse-form, as if the poet wanted us to experience the speech as something extraordinary.

Nowhere else in the poem is there such a consistent, concerted effort to sonically distinguish verses. Hypermetrics can be found elsewhere in the poem, but in dramatically decreased proportion: of the poem's twenty-six hypermetric lines, 17.5 occur in this speech of 136 lines (making the speech 13 percent hypermetric), whereas a mere seven hypermetric lines can be found in the poem's remaining 662 lines (making the rest of the poem 1 percent hypermetric). This simple statistical tally demonstrates that the Christ C-poet deliberately attempted to make Christ's words hypermetric, a sonic distinction which, in effect, performs the supernatural character of Christ's speech. The extraordinary sonic character of this supernatural speech is not an isolated occurrence, and in this book I demonstrate that hypermetrics and other poetic effects repeatedly distinguish supernatural speech in the Old English poems Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A. Furthermore, within a larger discussion of supernatural discourse, I explain what this distinction means for our interpretation of these poems and for our understanding of the social and religious functions of the Old English poetic medium.

Although the divine distinction of this speech in Christ C is relatively obvious, precious little has been said about this or other clear efforts by Old English poets to distinguish supernatural discourse by means of poetic style.