This chapter explores the multiple imbrications of literature and politics in the context of apartheid South Africa. It considers the literary-critical debates and interventions that underpinned and connected them and offers a reading of cultural-political resistance through the lens of periodical print culture and the lively publics they convened. It addresses a wide range of critical-cultural interventions from the late 1940s until the early 1980s and identifies the continuities and shifts that mark this tradition and points to some of the historical changes that have shaped it. What emerges is a long and vigorous history of dissonant cultural debate and an understanding of the central role it played in informing the aesthetic and political priorities of the writers of the day. The chapter asserts that political struggles in South Africa were frequently articulated in cultural terms and that forms of political critique often took shape as arguments about literature and the reading of texts. What this recognition demands, it argues, is an amplified understanding of the history of political struggle as played out, in part, in aesthetic-cultural terms.

This chapter argues that the emergence of Krautrock can only be understood against the background of the specific mixture of national and international impulses that shaped the West German musical scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What is striking is a high degree of politicisation that resulted, among other things, from the Nazi past and the position of the divided country at the interface of the Cold War. It fuelled a particularly radical student movement and at the same time legitimised a fundamental critique of the culture industry. Combined with the musical impulses from United States and Britain, this gave rise to very unique musical forms that seemed to counter the international mainstream with something entirely new.

Chapter 8 wraps up the discussion. It attempts to show how the Nights has been opening the gate for every kind of reading. Although the book, and this chapter in particular, is not a survey of scholarship, it selects instances that show a genealogical string that brings all the players on board, showing how the often marginalized John Payne is pivotal to the twentieth-century scene, not only because he was Richard F. Burton’s ghost translator, but also because he set the road for literary classification of the tales that nobody, not even Burton, can overlook. Twentieth-century scholars like Mia Gerhardt or Peter Heath cannot devise more typologies than Payne’s, but they add what “conditions of possibility” allow. The chapter focuses on critical typologies, textual and genealogical criticism, the comparatists’ pursuits, and also literary criticism. The latter covers genres and translational mediums, and poetics of narrative. It also looks upon cultural criticism as more nuanced than nineteenth-century readings of manners and customs. The chapter has to conclude with the question: Is the Nights adab? A refined belles lettres?

This chapter offers an explanation of Mailer’s notable contributions to the essay and column form, helping readers better understand his diverse roles in American literary culture. It addresses the biographical and cultural contexts that surrounded Mailer’s most notable early breakthroughs as a writer of nonfiction and public intellectual. In particular, this chapter focuses on the context for Mailer’s contributions to the Village Voice and Esquire.

Though many see the 1950s–1970s as the height of Mailer’s career, he remained a fixture in the literary world – and on best-seller lists – for decades afterward. During the last decade of his life, Mailer offers some of his sharpest and most poignant cultural commentaries, offering a critical appraisal of the American political system and the country’s political leaders, examining the way recent presidential administrations continue to feed the imperialist myth of an American empire, and weighing in on the subject of patriotism and American exceptionalism after 9/11. At this writing, it has been 13 years since his passing, and in some ways his early writings seem to be gaining in relevance, his nonfictional pieces serving as eerie predictions of contemporary issues, and have been referenced frequently in recent years.

The decades that followed 1940 in Ireland are conventionally framed in terms of literary underperformance and political exhaustion. This introduction sets out the volume as an important intervention into this common perception, energised by what can be considered a quantitative turn in Irish cultural criticism, with a concomitant spatial expansion of what can be termed ‘Irish literature’. This gives way to a discussion of how an ingrained theme in twentieth-century critical perspectives – that of distance between Irish culture and European and international influences – is belied by a contemporary literature which registered the impact of proximity and connection. The introduction goes on to discuss how these connections are measured by subsequent essays in the volume, some of which are thematised around literary traffic between Ireland and Europe, America, Britain, and beyond. The genres which contained these communications are also discussed in contributions, alongside the often interrelated questions of language, publishing, and reception, amongst others. In its conclusion, the essay describes the fragility of the Irish literary canon, offering the Irish writing of this period as uneven despite the international recognition that many of its authors were receiving.