Chapter 10 examines Goethe’s development as a writer of prose across the spectrum of forms, beginning with his radicalisation of the epistolary novel through his Werther. It highlights significant influences – from Giovanni Boccaccio to Sophie von La Roche – and, at the same time, emphasises the singularity of his writing. It also reflects on Goethe’s use of deliberate aestheticisation as a means of contending with the instability of human life. The chapter shows that Goethe’s prose writing is both thoroughly embedded in and transcends the many contexts from which it emerged.

This chapter focuses on a specific comics genre, crime fiction, and the multiple relationships between the two spheres of comics and graphic novels. It takes as its starting point the Crime Does Not Pay magazine (1942), while also presenting a detailed overview and critical analysis of the history of crime comics, which in the beginning often purported to be based on true crime stories. The chapter further analyzes the policy of EC Comics, which entered the crime fiction trend in 1948 before transitioning to horror and science fiction. The chapter then examines the appearance of a new orientation within the EC stories, aiming at effecting progressive social change, in sharp contrast to the severe criticism voiced by psychologist Fredric Wertham, whose anti-comics crusade resulted in the Comics Code (1954). After its implementation, crime fiction disappeared from mainstream comics, but reappeared in the independent comics boom, where creators continued to mine the subversive potential of the genre for political commentary. A close reading of Ed Brubaker’s oeuvre illustrates the new forms of the crime comics tradition today.

The Aeneid is qualifiedly Augustan. It does not suppress the problems of Augustus’ rise. It foregrounds human tragedy within the range of events in suspension, fortunae, though these cannot impede providential World Fate. Dido and Turnus make choices against fate that are up to them; the fact of fate’s providence makes these and other tragedies even more cruel. Virgil combines the Stoic concept of cosmic fate with the contemporary view that the Roman empire was coterminous with the inhabited world, and he innovatively adds that Rome’s universal fate is Stoically providential. He complicates that model with his emphasis on the human tragedy involved in Rome’s establishment. Rather than being Augustan or anti-Augustan, the Aeneid is realistic in its acceptance of the problems of Augustus’ rise and guardedly optimistic chiefly because of Virgil’s independent didacticism for Augustus. He presents as exempla for Augustus Hercules and Aeneas, though the latter’s defective inclemency to Turnus is meant to encourage Augustus’ well-advertised exercise of clemency. Anchises’ words at Aeneid 6.851–3 have a special didactic application to Augustus: ‘tu regere imperio .... memento’.

In their efforts to establish children’s literature as a distinct genre, eighteenth-century writers and publishers tailored their texts to the unique needs of young readers. This chapter considers how these negotiations reflect different attitudes towards children’s small bodies, limited life experience, and comparatively narrow understandings when modern conceptions of childhood were still developing. Though books for young people needed to be shorter and more syntactically straightforward than those written for adults, children’s authors were adamant that their works should not be viewed as inferior. Embracing the concept of multum in parvo (much in little), figures such as John Newbery, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ellenor Fenn demonstrated that the simplicity of children’s literature was the product of complex aesthetic, pedagogical, and commercial underpinnings. Early children’s books regularly offered lessons in the subjectivity and mutability of scale, framing young readers as “little giants” whose unruly growth sent them skyrocketing, showing how childish egoism produced an overinflated sense of self, or using Tom Thumb as a model for how greatness might reside within littleness. This chapter also attends to the style of children’s literature, exploring stories written in words of one syllable and short forms such as fables and couplets.

This chapter tackles the translation of contemporary teenage literature through its focus on language as a problem – ambiguous, riddled with misunderstandings, clumsy, or subject to rapidly changing norms. Translating teenage literature implies navigating spaces between language as a place of both acculturation and experimentation. The first part explores elements within teenage fiction that invite the translator to treat language as resistant, alien, difficult. The next show that those literary nudges are counterbalanced by editorial drives towards naturalness and domestication. This leads to the necessity for the translator to commit not just politically but didactically to the text. The last part looks at what creative translation workshops with teenagers themselves might bring the translator in this endeavour, offering a meeting-point for aesthetic and didactic considerations in the translation of adolescent fiction.

This introduction sets forth the approach to Byzantine commentaries on ancient Greek texts taken in this volume: it places the Komnenian and Palaiologan commentaries firmly within their intellectual and sociocultural contexts and examines the process of commenting on ancient texts as a deliberate and culturally significant choice made by the commentators. We define commentary both in a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrowest sense, commentaries are concerned with explaining an ancient text and the knowledge related to it, often in a didactic context. Defined more broadly, commentaries include treatises on ancient literature and paraphrases of ancient authorities, which likewise demonstrate how these texts were read and taught. In the broadest sense, commentaries can be any literary texts that creatively engage with ancient texts and thus shed light on Byzantine attitudes towards their ancient heritage. The very practice of composing commentaries on ancient texts was a creative and targeted enterprise of identity building. The introduction discusses different kinds of Byzantine commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science, and introduces some of the key figures of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods.

Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.

This chapter considers the changing but enduring fortunes of didacticism across the Victorian period, from Romanticism before it to Modernism after it; it does so by investigating the function of the rhetorical question as it is shaped by scenes of correction in didactic fiction. The chapter shows that those scenes of correction exemplified in pre-Victorian novels are recast satirically by Dickens and Brontë, among others, while the tradition of didacticism remains an influence upon Thackeray’s narrative style.

The Introduction describes the basic arguments and scope of the book. It gives a survey of the secondary scholarship on the subject, with the contention that scholars had focused mostly on historiographical texts and neglected to study ideas of the past across the broader corpus. Moreover, it argues that there is a culturalist bias in their readings that reduces the early Chinese engagement with the past to a matter of cultural attitude. On the basis of this survey of secondary scholarship, the Introduction describes the specific perspective and methods of this study. First, it will engage with a variety of materials, both historiographical and non-historiographical; second, it will approach early Chinese narratives about the past not as expressions of cultural beliefs but as argumentative utterances in the broader political and ethical debates.