“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

The next chapter on Macbeth looks at how the play uses a Baroque, expressionist aesthetic to help define the empty world of power it depicts, and the ambiguities of the Baroque aesthetic form as defined by Walter Benjamin provide the setting for the faint glimmers of utopian thinking in the play. In this, the complicated figures called the Weird Sisters in the play’s text – but Witches in the paratextual stage directions and speech prefixes of the non-authorial Folio text – play a central role and get detailed examination. They are fundamentally ambiguous dramatic figures, showing conflicting traits as both the Three Fates of classical mythology and witches of medieval and early modern legend and belief-systems. Accordingly, they can be seen as either detached prophets merely predicting events, or co-agents of Macbeth’s crimes and failures. There are even utopian elements in their complex construction, especially if the songs Thomas Middleton inserted in the Folio text are taken into account. But the play remains a dark tragedy of the emptiness and cruelty of the politics of force, its hints at utopian alternatives muted and subordinated to the predominant bleak and troubling qualities of a world dominated by force and power.

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.

The hybrid name for Latin America is a clue to its double consciousness and, as a corollary, to its talent for exploring complexity. A push and pull between competing classical and local lineages among displaced and replaced peoples has brought curses on Latin America, but also the blessings of an unbidden freedom to invent new patterns. If bitterness haunts the deracination on a continental scale, irreverence lightens the burden. From colonial times through the current post-Boom period, Latin American literature has been a vehicle for cagey revenge against metropolitan conventions, and for re-membering aboriginal cultures. The legend of Inkari, for example, literally foretells how the body of the Inca emperor, dismembered by Spanish conquerors, will reassemble underground and emerge triumphant. Double consciousness in Latin America describes a culture of baroque anxiety and compensation for doubt about one’s place in the world. With Afro-Latin American literature, the ironies multiply exponentially. Architectural monuments to excess -- meant to overwhelm worries that followed from the discovery of sophisticated cultures that had no debts Europe – worries about the nature of God, the center of culture, one’s own identity -- are visible throughout the continent’s landscape. Local gods and African orishas adorn Catholic temples. Excess is audible too, in the complex strategies for addressing readers, starting from colonial times and reviving after interruptions of purposeful coherence and optimism. The great first masters of Latin American literature were baroque, practically by default as they navigated conflicting codes and overwhelmed the fault lines with clever structures. As pioneers of local style, they set the tone for future movements, through the taste for complexity waffled when political ambitions for independence or national consolidation triumphed through foundational fictions written by political leaders in order to win the hearts of newly minted citizens.  Compared to the skillful jousts with European conventions by baroque masters, nation builders and populists would seem naïve to the ironic novelists who ignited a Boom in Latin American literature and who brought European readers face to face with the structural contradictions of modern cultures.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.

Surrealism thrived within environments characterized by a profusion of collected objects that inspired the surrealist collector’s work and thought. André Breton (in Paris) and Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (in Sussex) had well-documented collections that reveal the practice of collecting at the root of surrealist theories of the object; they anticipated recent explorations of new materialism by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and of the object as thing by W. J. T. Mitchell. Breton saw “concealed realities” and “latent possibilities” in objects in a way that foreshadowed the “vital materialism” Bennett finds in things. Like Breton, Penrose and Miller favored objects that had had a ceremonial function in their culture of origin, remote in time as well as geographically, as a way of understanding themselves better. In both collections, the impressive sculptures from the Pacific Islands exemplify the surrealist desire to orient the self within a larger world through objects capable of looking back.

The style of George Meredith represents an opposite extreme from Trollope: dense with epigram and ornament, it is frequently denigrated as extravagant and obscure, violating the realist conventions that Trollope worked hard to establish. However, Chapter 6 demonstrates how Meredith drew on the virtues of Asiatic and baroque styles to create a new form of psychological realism characterized by “fervidness,” the intensity that arises when contradictory principles are held in tension. On the one hand, Meredith gravitated to short forms like epigram to distill complex thoughts into memorable phrases; on the other, he delighted in the flights of fancy permitted by prosaic expansiveness. Through a consideration of major and minor work, this chapter reveals how fervidness is embodied structurally as a drama between conditions of freedom and constraint that impinge upon the development of central characters. In this way, Meredith’s “fervidness” formally replicates a dynamic that plays out thematically, making his style much more referential in terms of its relation to content than that of either Thackeray or Trollope before him.

The twenty-first-century poets and poems of the nearly Baroque want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first. Some poets, such as Angie Estes, Robyn Schiff, and Lucie Brock-Broido have pursued a nearly Baroque aesthetic for almost the whole of their careers. Other recent exemplars include Nada Gordon, Ange Mlinko, Kiki Petrosino, Geoffrey Nutter, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Nearly Baroque contemporary poems exhibit elaborate syntax, and self-consciously elaborate sonic patterning, without adopting pre-modernist forms. The nearly Baroque is a femme aesthetic and defends traditionally feminine ideas of beauty and extravagance against the insistence on practicality, on political utility, on conceptual novelty, or on efficiency. At the same time these poets tend to note – they may sound guilty about – the serious effort and energy devoted to making such complicated, luxurious, or apparently useless things as contemporary literary poems. The most recent poets to work in the nearly Baroque idiom take increasing account of the actual bodies and bodily histories that do not fit well with conventional standards of prettiness, ornament, femininity, or beauty. Poets of color who foreground race have sometimes chosen not so much exactly the strategies described here but related ones, ones that benefit from the comparison.

This chapter backtracks to 1601, revealing that the vogue for novels said to be true (pseudofactual) was in fact the outcome of previous evolutions, rather than simply a traditional practice or a reaction against an earlier fanciful novel (often called romance). Specifically, during the seventeenth century the novel mimed epic and tragedy in borrowing its protagonists from history, becoming measurably more “Aristotelian” starting around the 1630s. It was this Aristotelian novel that subsequently declined in the face of the pseudofactual novel described in Chapter 1. Taken together, these two chapters demonstrate that modern critical investment in a “single birth” narrative — i.e., that the novel rose where once there was nothing like it — is untenable.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.