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.

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.

This introduction offers a theoretical model for reading the relation between the conditions that determine the possibility of literary expression, and those possibilities that literature itself invents. It is in the relation between these two forms of possibility, the introduction argues, that the politics of literary form resides.

The last two decades of critical thinking have seen a quite radical shift in our understanding of this relationship. The introduction traces these shifts, and places the essays collected in this volume (written over that two decade period) in the context of such theoretical and political transformations. The passage of literary thinking in the current century, the introduction argues, requires a new critical understanding of literary possibility, which it is the task of these essays to perform.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

Chapter 30 examines Goethe’s relationship with America. The country was for him an imagined space full of possibility, a historical frontier which opened onto modernity. The chapter considers the transatlantic network which, in the post-Napoleonic period, linked Harvard, Göttingen and Weimar, and would prove particularly important for Goethe’s geological studies. It also describes the – at times ambivalent – perspectives on American democracy that reached Goethe from Prince Bernhard, the son of Carl August, during his American travels, before moving to an analysis of American influences on and representations of America in Goethe’s literary work.

Chapter 24 offers an overview of Goethe’s geological output, a vast but somewhat understudied area of his work. It focuses in particular on Ilmenau, where between 1776 and 1796 Goethe supervised a mining project, and it argues that, despite the ultimate failure of the enterprise, the Ilmenau period was crucial in developing Goethe’s understanding of geological issues. The chapter also charts the course of Goethe’s geological work after the Ilmenau period, and it brings to light the geological references which pervade his literary work – including Faust and some of his best-loved poems.

Chapter 29 centres on Goethe’s idea of China. Goethe was initially ambivalent, even condescending, about Chinese culture and aesthetics, but in later years, this attitude was replaced by a greater degree of interest in the country. This chapter explores the evolution of Goethe’s position on China, beginning with the eighteenth-century fashion for chinoiserie and Goethe’s disparagement of it; it then considers Goethe’s more open-minded engagement with Chinese literature in translation towards the end of his life, noting at the same time the gulf between Goethe’s source material and China’s most representative cultural outputs.

This contribution attempts to reconstruct the lost voices of Roman freed persons by focusing on the performative function of literary texts, rather than on their authorship. A study of the performative function of texts considers the contextual motivations of an author’s decision to cite, (re)phrase, and frame freed person’s words, and allows for a nuanced deconstruction of certain passages that might otherwise be labeled merely “elite discourse.” The texts chosen for this analysis are Cicero’s correspondence with Tiro, Tacitus’ historical works, and a letter written by the freed man Timarchides as quoted by Cicero in his oratio against Verres. Ultimately, the contribution’s goal is to suggest a methodological approach that – to some extent – rehabilitates literary texts as evidence for the freed person’s voice, and to argue that the value of literary sources when trying to recover this voice lies specifically in the tension between the public limits of freed persons’ (discursive) agency on the one hand, and the range and inventiveness of their self-representation in the context of their own or their patron’s trust network on the other.