This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

The Epilogue weaves together disparate strands of resistant, worldly thinking under the aegis of Latin America. The scholar Taymiya Zaman uses Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges to decolonize the writing of history. The novelist Karan Mahajan references Bolaño to demand that American readers to approach his version of India on its own terms. And two writers – the despondent Tanuj Solanki and the hopeful Mohsin Hamid – invoke the countershelf at the end of the world.