This chapter introduces the key themes and characters in Byzantine literary reconfigurations of epic. After some introductory remarks about the reception of ancient Greek epic in Byzantium, the chapter is divided into two main parts: the first is dedicated to the only Byzantine epos Digenis Akritis (twelfth century CE), the other to late Byzantine romances which contain Homeric themes, especially the Byzantine Iliad, and Byzantine Achilleid, both from the fourteenth century. Kulhánková’s discussion also pays close attention to the question of genre, probing the overlapping of romance and epos in these works, and revealing their mutual influences.

During the 1750s and 60s, Rousseau formulated perhaps the most influential philosophical and political arguments for sentimentality and the tableau. Against the claim of early capitalist ideologues that society was no more than a rational balance of individuals’ material ‘interests’, Rousseau imagined the mythical origin of society as a theatrical scene or musical performance, in which self-regard or vanity (amour-propre) competed with sympathy and tenderness towards others. The balance between these could be tipped away from individualism through the persuasive power of sentimental music and drama, shaping public opinion by absorbing audiences in its affecting tableaux. This vision proved its political effectiveness in eighteenth-century opéra comique and nineteenth-century Romantic melodrama. On the other hand, Rousseau’s denial of rights over public sentimental feeling to women, though contested, in the long run weakened sentimentality by making it into a private, domestic commodity – as shown by the history of another genre Rousseau inaugurated, the romance.

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.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.

This chapter traces the emergence of the fairy tale as a generically defined form in Britain in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues that this process of generic consolidation was the product of a series of fruitful creative and commercial interchanges of narrative tradition with the continent of Europe. To make this argument, the chapter focuses upon the importance, for British approaches to the fairy tale, of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French vogues for literary fairy tales, and the revolution in approaches to traditional storytelling spearheaded in nineteenth-century Germany. It is also proposed that the work of the Scottish fairy-tale collector and anthologist Andrew Lang in consolidating and popularizing these continental traditions at the end of the nineteenth century was instrumental in giving shape to British ideas about the fairy tale at the cusp of the twentieth century. Writers, translators, and collectors considered in this chapter include Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, and Robert Samber.

The literary oeuvre of the seventeenth-century literary genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is genre-diverse: it includes plays, texts defending women’s intellectual agency, correspondence, religious-themed works, and, last but not least, poetry. Sor Juana’s texts are touchpoints for nearly all facets of colonial literary studies; her lyric works are invoked in critical conversations treating transatlantic studies, Barroco de Indias, New Spanish creolism, and feminist studies. Sor Juana’s lyric works evince not only her intellectual prowess, but also her artistic mastery of a variety of poetic forms, unequalled in her day or after her lifetime. This chapter examines the range of Sor Juana’s lyric writing in its totality, from her masterpiece, Primero sueño, to her renowned romances, redondillas, sonetos, and villancicos, contextualizing these in the scholarly and historical contexts out of which they arise.

This chapter identifies a strain of political, affective maladjustment it labels “Hopeless Romanticism,” of which Percy Bysshe Shelley is an exemplary case. It argues that hope plays a fundamental role in the progressivist refusal to abide by the terms of the status quo. Hopeless romantics hold on to visions of a better world in spite of the crushing realities that surround them. This chapter tracks how this affective mechanism manifests in a series of Shelleyan poems where hope leaps past probabilistic boundaries, even as the despair that is hope’s other side repeatedly intrudes. Hope’s structural investment in futurity has made it both a symptom of weakened individual agency and a social portent of political change.

This chapter deals with the fornaldarsögur (sagas of olden times), defined as legendary sagas about events in Nordic countries before the settlement of Iceland. It sets out the evidence of their popularity and describes the extent of their geographical settings. After noting their stylistic similarities to Íslendingasögur, the discussion moves on to place them within the larger European and heroic tradition, outlining the material they share with Old English and Middle High German literature and their links to eddic and skaldic verse. The influences of French courtly literature, religious literature and classical sources are explored. The folkloric dimension of the fornaldarsögur is pointed out, and the possibility of classifying the sagas as generic hybrids is suggested. Next the transmission of fornaldarsögur is discussed, followed by a reassessment of how the corpus might be divided into subgroups. The chapter then discusses possible composition dates and provides an analysis of the emergence of the genre, including the influence of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. It ends with a discussion of fantastical narrative elements, which led to the label lygisögur (‘lying sagas’).

This chapter provides an overview of the riddarasögur as a genre, beginning with the first transmission of romance material to Norway in the thirteenth century. It describes how this material was translated, adapted and reworked in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, giving rise to a blossoming literary tradition in Iceland which drew on the translated riddarasögur but featured a uniquely local perspective and narrative emphasis. The chapter discusses the relationship of the translated and indigenous romances to other genres within the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus, and argues that the romances introduced an ‘emotive script’ which offered a means of exploring concepts such as masculinity, femininity, honour and identity in a different way from existing genres. It surveys current scholarly interest in the sagas, looking in particular at their attitude to emotion, gender and agency – focusing on the so-called maiden king romances – as well as the geographic expansionism of the works, which offered their readers a vision of the world far beyond the borders of Iceland, informed by contemporary cosmographical learning.

The subject of this chapter is rímur (rhymes), long narrative poems intended to be delivered orally, which were the most important secular poetic genre in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the genre, beginning with a brief introduction to the rímur and the terminology used to describe them, before focusing in detail on their metrical form and linguistic features. It then discusses the relationship of the rímur with their different kinds of source material, since almost all are based on pre-existing narratives, particularly the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. It surveys what is known of the poems’ authorship, performance and dating, as well as describing the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Finally, it outlines the critical and editorial history of the rímur, arguing that their unusual linguistic and metrical features, their long-lasting popularity and the significance of their interactions with other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature means they deserve more scholarly attention than they have typically received.

Chapter 2 reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and consequently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim the status he lost through penury. I argue that what makes these romances amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour, trouthe, and faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily in a willingness to take economic risks, variously extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up generating profit for the knight and for his community. Belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal and hierarchical.

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

Originally written in Malayalam, Indian writer O. Chandumenon’s novel, Indulekha (1889–90) was translated into English within a year of its publication and reprinted every year for almost a century. This chapter focuses on Indulekha’s engagement with a matrilineal household, typical of the Nair community in late nineteenth-century Malabar. In doing so, the chapter is attentive to the novel’s choice of genre. By taking up matriliny through the lens of realism, the novel not only departs from a fairly common nineteenth-century practice of depicting matriliny through romance but also remaps realism, extending its scope and valence amidst the social, sexual, and political shifts marking the fin de siècle, transimperially conceived.

This chapter explores the ways in which modern works of Fantasy remake longstanding cultural forms. It modifies John Clute’s notion of taproot texts by focusing on larger-scale modes of meaning-making rather than individual influential works, examining the ways in which Fantasy is deeply informed by myths and legends, epic and romance, folk and fairy tales, and religions. Any one of these could be the subject for a book in itself, so the chapter employs a selective approach, giving a sense of each mode’s larger patterns, exploring how these have been taken up in Fantasy and examining a small selection of case studies. The myths and legends section focuses on how recent Fantasy texts remake the story of Hades and Persephone, considering Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, Supergiant’s game Hades and Rachel Smythe’s webtoon Lore Olympus. Other key works discussed include Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Travels with the Snow Queen’.